In the article I posted when The Night Visitors first launched, I detailed The Night Visitors Vampire Research Society’s raison d’être. I mentioned a man named Dr. Stephen Kaplan and said I would return to him in a future article. Today, I would like to go a little deeper into who he was, what he built, and why his work still matters now more than ever.

Sometime in the mid-2000s, I stumbled across a book called Vampires Are by Dr. Stephen Kaplan and Carole Kane. I say “stumbled across” because that’s genuinely what it was, a chance encounter with a volume I had never heard of and could find virtually no information about. I had no idea at the time just how rare a find it was. Vampires Are published by ETC Publishing in 1984 and documents the first decade of research conducted by Dr. Kaplan through his organization, the Vampire Research Center, based in New York. Today, the book is extraordinarily difficult to find, and the few copies that do surface online regularly sell for hundreds of dollars. That alone tells you something about the niche within a niche that serious vampirology occupies.

Reading Vampires Are stirred something up for me. Here was a man who had dedicated years of his life to the rigorous, methodical study of vampirism, not as a hobbyist, not as a sensation-seeker (although he did love media attention, and I say good for him!), but as a genuine researcher who wanted to separate fact from fiction, documenting what was actually out there. It was exactly the kind of work I had always felt was missing from the conversation around vampires, and it planted a seed that, years later, would grow into The Night Visitors Vampire Research Society.

Stephen Kaplan was born in the Bronx, New York, in 1940. He earned a BA in Sociology and an MS in Education from the City College of New York and spent his career working as a teacher for the New York City Board of Education. He was also, quietly and passionately, one of the most serious paranormal investigators of his era. He founded the Parapsychology Institute of America in 1971 and, in 1972, established the Vampire Research Center located in New York.

Kaplan’s best-documented legacy may actually be his Amityville Horror investigation. He argued that George and Kathy Lutz fabricated the haunting story, and his work became the basis for The Amityville Horror Conspiracy. This all took place only a few years after founding both of his organizations.

The Vampire Research Center was not a fringe operation run by enthusiasts in a basement. Kaplan assembled a team that included anthropologists, sociologists, hematologists, and psychologists. His methodology was deliberate and structured. He set up a dedicated hotline for people to make initial contact, conducted in-person interviews and house calls, and developed a 99-question evaluation questionnaire to rigorously assess each case. To distinguish genuine cases from psychological mimicry or outright fraud, he employed what he called a “vampire test kit,” containing holy water, garlic, a cross, and a Star of David. This was empirical work, grounded in skepticism as much as belief.

A frequent guest on talk shows and someone people actually called when they believed they had encountered a vampire, he was no stranger to the public eye. In the 80s, he was a recognized voice in the paranormal community on Long Island, having conducted over 2,000 radio interviews and making 135 television appearances.

Since his death in 1995, at the relatively young age of 54, vampires’ popularity has skyrocketed and has never been more visible in popular culture than they have been in the three decades since his passing. Yet, nobody has stepped in to continue the type of research he was doing.

The 1990s and 2000s brought an explosion of vampire fiction and film: Interview with the Vampire, the entire Buffy the Vampire Slayer universe, Blade, Twilight, True Blood, and dozens of others. Vampires became a billion-dollar cultural industry. Each new incarnation of the vampire attracted a different audience, expanding the vampire’s reach far beyond traditional horror fans. But there is an important distinction between the popularity of vampires as fictional characters and public interest in vampirism as a real phenomenon. The former flourished, fuelled by publishing, film, television, and increasingly sophisticated marketing and online fandom. The latter never developed a comparable infrastructure for investigation. In fact, the more vampires became a familiar part of mainstream entertainment, the easier it became to dismiss anyone claiming a genuine encounter as someone influenced by popular culture. That makes Kaplan’s work particularly interesting in retrospect. He was attempting to document people’s accounts and assess them systematically at a time when the vampire was already moving from the margins of horror into the mainstream, yet the research itself never gained a comparable foothold.

The paranormal research world moved in a different direction entirely. Ghost hunting became a television genre in its own right. Demonologists, witches, cryptid researchers, and investigators of every conceivable stripe found platforms and audiences. Vampirism, despite being arguably the most mythologically rich and globally widespread of all supernatural traditions, remained almost entirely without dedicated field researchers.

Although modern vampire and “real vampire” communities, academic folklore studies, and online paranormal investigators do document self-identified vampire experiences, nobody today is following Kaplan’s model. Nobody today is doing the kind of structured, empirical, intake-and-interview work that Dr. Kaplan was doing out of Queens in the 1980s. Nobody is running a hotline or the present-day equivalent of it. Nobody has a standardized questionnaire. Nobody is conducting house calls to meet the people who believe they have encountered something genuinely vampiric, whether that is a sanguinarian, a psychic vampire, or something more in line with the folkloric traditions of Romania, the Philippines, the Caribbean, or the Slavic countries. That gap is real, and ultimately a gap that The Night Visitors Vampire Research Society would like to fill. We are not, at this stage, a fully staffed research institute with a multidisciplinary team (although one day, hopefully). What we are is a serious, good-faith effort to create a space where people with genuine experiences can come forward and be heard, their accounts documented with care and without ridicule. We are building the kind of archive that serious research requires with testimonies, cross-referenced by region, type of entity, and nature of encounter.

Dr. Kaplan’s work showed that when you create a credible, non-judgmental point of contact, people come forward. They always have. What was lacking was someone willing to listen. That is what we intend to do.

If you have had an encounter with a psychic vampire, a sanguinarian vampire, or with something that fits more squarely within the folkloric traditions of your culture, we want to hear from you. Your privacy is always protected; we change names and any identifying details before anything is shared publicly. You can reach us directly at thenightvisitorsvrs@gmail.com.

Dr. Stephen Kaplan deserved far more recognition than history gave him. Part of what we can do at The Night Visitors is make sure his name stays in the conversation and that the conversation itself continues.

Have you ever come across a rare copy of Kaplan’s 1984 book Vampires Are, or do you remember seeing him on TV back in the day? I would love to hear your favorite piece of forgotten paranormal history!

The Night Visitors’ Raison d’Être

Thank you for taking the time to visit us at The Night Visitors Vampire Research Society Vampire Chronicles Publication. If you have any personal experiences with vampires you’d like to share, or if you have any suggestions as to which aspects of vampirism you’d like to see explored in blog posts and YouTube videos, please email us at thenightvisitorsvrs@gmail.com.

You can also connect with fellow Night Visitors from around the world when you join my Facebook group

To watch the Night Visitor’s Vampire Research Society’s true stories, subscribe to the YouTube channel @VampireResearchSociety, or visit my website at thenightvisitors.com

The Lost Science of Vampirology: Dr. Stephen Kaplan and the Search for Real Vampires was originally published in The Night Visitors Chronicles on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

My dearest Yuri, if you learn nothing else from these pages, please understand that I love you and that leaving you is an act of mercy. During our brief time together, you asked me to share my story, my history of life and death. I refused, not wanting to remember my painful past but instead spend my days intoxicated by your scent of a young male in love. I hoped we could stay there forever, an endless succession of summer nights in Provincetown where throngs of tourists come to live another life, to be somebody else if only for a short time amidst a perverse vernal carnival. The saddest lesson my century of living death has taught me is that from dusk until dawn everything can change beyond recognition and without any hope of returning to the life you knew. The winds of bad change have called me away from you. The face of a man so evil he could not concede me peace even in death once again haunts my dreams. Incapable of love, he seeks to destroy all those I care for, and I love you far too much to let such a miserable fate befall you. So in the early evening I pulled myself from your arms, kissed your forehead and scribbled a quick goodbye note and hated myself more with each passing second as I walked away. You have in your hands what you’ve wanted to know. This is my story, where I come from, how in the course of one night my reality changed when I died and rose again. Setting pen to paper to relive a time of such misery only saddens me, but you deserve to know the truth of why we cannot be together, but most of all, I hope that you know that these pages are a story of love, my love for you.

The late afternoon sun mellows to shades of gold and caramel. Soon the night sky will reign over the streets I knew before I drank blood, when I could feel the same sun on my skin. My days were finite then. The harsh reality of forever seemed pure folly. This city is called Cluj-Napoca, today in Romania, but known in my youth as Kolozsvar, an important center of culture and commerce in the Transylvania region of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Only the city center remains as it was then with churches, homes and shops that have stood there for hundreds of years. The surrounding neighborhoods once littered with beautiful mansions surrounded by orchards and gardens are today scarred with gray, crumbling communist era blocks and do-nothing factories that are as ugly and soulless as the system that spawned them.

This is where I come from. Many of the family names on the tenants’ association roster posted in the entryway of the apartment building where I now stay are the same as they were during the First World War when one of my husband’s companies built this very building. Some of them are no doubt the grandchildren and great grandchildren of the people he sold the apartments to almost a hundred years ago. It is evening now and I open the curtain to reveal a busy scene below. Packed street cars wobble along precariously placed tracks with taxis zipping past. The people in the streetcars and taxis and their mundane, mediocre lives do not interest me. I care about you, Yuri, and think of you, always about you.

Across the street, there is a boy who reminds me of you. His thoughts call to me from deep inside his tortured soul. They call him Catalin, this sad boy who I watch every evening. He lies on his bed, staring blankly into the TV, his white skin illuminated by its blue glow like some unholy spirit. He thinks of dissolving codeine tablets in vodka and drinking the bitter liquid to end his pain or going out with a blaze of crimson glory with slit wrists is a tub of warm water. Nimeni ma iubeste, he repeats again and again in his thoughts, sunt blestemat. Nobody loves me, I am damned. I want to save him, to run across the street and scoop his tender body into my arms. I love you, I would say. You are not damned, I will save you, but I cannot save him just as I could not save you or myself. All I can do is turn away and pray that a friend, a lover, a hero will save him and dispel his dark cloud of depression and love him as he needs.

I must turn my thoughts from Catalin and begin the task at hand. I have a story to tell, the tale of one night that began a century heavy with pain, tedium and rage. November 1st 1918 was the night that changed my life forever, or rather ended my life and ushered me into an existence of living death. I was twenty-three and married to a horrendously evil man who derived pleasure from hurting and belittling those who were too weak to fight back. My life up until this point is of little relevance, but I will say that I was not weak and defeated. I had known love before being trapped in a hate-filled marriage and I lived with the hope that I would someday escape my misery.

Born the youngest daughter of a Hungarian army general and a lazy Romanian socialite in Kolozsvar, Austria-Hungary, I lived and died during the final years of a crumbling empire. My education included finishing school, French and German lessons and all that young women of my social class needed to know in order to marry well. In the summer of 1914, when I was nineteen I fell in love with a Romanian boy named Andrei, an impoverished peasant who road into town every day on a donkey drawn cart to sell cabbage in the city’s central market. The mere knowledge of my association with him would have given my mother a heart attack, which in retrospect would have saved me much misery, but fate had another destiny in store. One day I had accompanied our housekeeper to the market to buy vegetables and as I gave Andrei a few coins our hands touched, our eyes met and for the rest of that week I would make every excuse to go on daily trips on the open air market.

Andrei would hand over his duties to a younger brother or abandon his cart all together and walk with me to the central park or abscond with me to tiny alleyways off Fő Tér, Cluj’s central square. The sensation of him pressing me against the bricks hot with midday sun, probing my mouth with his wet, slippery tongue and touching me with his dirt covered fingers sent never before felt bursts of pleasure radiating through my inexperienced body. The words to describe the feeling elude me. Perhaps it is something that can only be lived.

“Let me finish,” he begged one day toward the end of our weeklong romance. “Let me put it inside you.”

“Not here, Andrei. I know a place. Meet me tomorrow at the Mattias Corvin statue and we’ll go there together. I want this too, but not up against a wall in a city alley where people can walk by at any moment.” Andrei laughed and he gave me one of his charming smiles when he realized the absurdity of his request.

“Of course. Tomorrow morning I will meet you in front of the church by the Mattias Corvin statue.”

He kissed me again, hard and deep, and gently caressed my face with his hand rough with callouses only the peasant life can produce.

The following morning while the entire house slept, I sneaked out before dawn, knowing that my mother would ask too many questions and the servants had no choice but to be her informants. The early summer flowers that lined the Someș River smelled sweet and heavy with happiness as I dangled my feet in the brown waters and watched the sun climb higher in the sky counting the minutes until I would meet Andrei. He was standing there true to his word with a bouquet of flowers handpicked from his country garden. Such a simple gesture brought tears to my eyes. Despite my family’s vast wealth, nobody had ever given me anything. My mother provided me with expensive clothing and the best tutors but this was only to impress people who ultimately did not matter, meanwhile birthdays and holidays passed without even a simple gift. Today, I own property on three continents as well a priceless works of art and I have accounts in Switzerland, Luxembourg and Hong Kong with balances in the high millions of euros, dollars and British pounds, but I will say that nothing has ever made me as happy as that bouquet of wildflowers.

We moved through the city center down side streets, past shops and homes and finally made our way to rolling green fields outside the city limits to the place where the centuries old Calvaria Church stood in ruins at the time. Today it is fully restored to its former glory, albeit surrounded by atrocious gray housing blocks that sprang up in the Manaștur district during the final years of communism in the 1980’s. In 1918, this area was the middle of nowhere, and the perfect place for Andrei and I to fall into each other’s arms and engage in passionate, clumsy adolescent love making. He touched me, kissed me with his thick full lips, probing exploring, teasing and lifting me higher to new levels of ecstasy that before that day I would have thought impossible. After what seemed like an interminable stretch of time, he pulled me close and whispered “I can’t wait any longer; I need to be inside you.” I didn’t think twice of the consequences that a moment of pleasure could bring, blinded by the false invincibility of youth. The act itself lasted only a few seconds and was an odd mixture of pleasure and pain that was not unpleasant but paled in comparison to the gentle touch and desirous rapture that had preceded it.

“I love you, Nadejda.” He said between labored breaths. “I want to marry you.”

“Marry me then. Take me away with you.”

“I have nothing to offer you; I can’t give you a decent life. You’re the daughter of Istvan and Mirela Szabo. How can I compete with the life that you were born into?”

“So, I’m good enough to fuck, but too much of a chore to have as a wife?”

“No, iubirea mea,” my love, he called me. “I love you and I will marry you. I just need money which I will never have selling cabbage. I have a plan I’ve discussed with my father. Since, I know how to read and write Hungarian, I’m going to join the Emperor’s Army and after six months of training I will receive a post at a local government office, a decent salary and a housing allowance. Then we can be married. I’m enlisting tomorrow morning. I still won’t be able to give you the life you’re used to, but it will be more than that of a country peasant’s wife.”

“I just need you, Andrei. I will live in a shack and forage for fruit in the forest if I have to. The life I’ve lived isn’t what it seems. It’s lonely, cold and rigid. If you took me away today, I would be so happy.”

He kissed me, stopping the words flowing from my mouth. “I love you, Nadia. I will take care of you. I will be back for you in six months, then we can be married and your mother or anyone else cannot do a thing about it.”

Andrei stood and took my hand. Together we ran to the wall of the church. He produced a pocket knife and chipped away carefully at the soft limestone. He inscribed the words “Nadejda si Andrei, Iubirea Vesnica: 21 iunie 1914,” Nadejda and Andrei, Eternal Love: 21 June 1914, and etched a heart around the inscription. “There! Now when you miss me these months, you can walk here and see this and know that I love you and am coming back for you. One day we will walk with our children and grandchildren by this church and show them how in love we were in our youth and always will be.” He made me smile with his kind words, although the cruelness of fate saw to it that we never did walk again by that church. My hateful mother, a world war and a gypsy curse all conspired to take Andrei away from me, but that afternoon, as he held me in his arms leaning against the walls of Calvaria Church, I believed him and I knew that love was eternal. Andrei did of course keep his word, although it was much longer than six months before we would meet again and what greeted him when he came back was a reality so horrible that it made the worst of nightmares seem tame.

Two nights ago, I returned to Calvaria Church, which now stands in the middle of a park in a residential district where mothers push strollers and gossip about the banal and absurd. The inscription is still there, as clear as it was that day in June so long ago. Other inscriptions carved by lovers down through the decades have popped up around ours. I hope their stories had a happier ending than mine. As I stood there remembering the feel of the hot June sun and Andrei’s strong, gentle caress I could not help but ask myself how things might have been different had I insisted we run away, dissuaded him from his plan to join the army and instead ran off with him to the country. This did not happen and to obsess about the past can only bring insanity, and I don’t wish to travel down that road. Instead we kissed goodbye as the sun went down and I returned home with full faith in his plan of seeking me out after securing a career in the Emperor’s Army. I should have paid more attention to the old saying people make plans and God laughs.

The sky was a dark purple when I arrived home, greeted by a strong slap across the face from my mother. She pushed me into the parlor forcing me down onto the sofa. “Listen to me, you ungrateful whore. I know everything that has happen between you and that boy. I have people all over the city and know what you do at all times. It’s over. You will never see him again. Have you forgotten who I am and the connections I have? I know of his plans to enlist in the army as well. I will see to it that he is placed in a remote Balkan outpost where, God willing, he will be shot by Turkish or Slavic rebels and no longer be my problem, but be assured that you will never see that peasant trash again. You will marry a proper match, a decent boy from a good family equal to our social status that can add to our family fortune. I’ve invested far too much to see you run off with that piece of country shit.” She pushed me from the sofa onto the floor. My knees cracked against the hard floor tiles, before I could rise to my feet, she grabbed my hair and forced me in the direction of the staircase. “Now go to your room and stay there. The servants will deliver your food and you will have one hour a day to bathe, otherwise you will be confined to your room until I say otherwise.”

“I will dance for joy the day you die, you fucking cunt!” I spat at her feet before running up the stairs. The air circled behind me as she followed, though I did not look back. As I threw myself on the bed, I could hear the door being locked from the outside. I tossed a china tea cup that a servant had left in my room against the door followed by books, framed photographs and anything that would make a loud crash or thud then I collapsed out of sheer exhaustion, this new rage having drained me along with the hours of bliss I’d spent with Andrei. In the morning there would be time to hate, time to conspire against my mother, to plan my escape from this domestic prison. Sweet fatigue claimed me and carried me off to dreams of being in Andrei’s arms.

A string of miserable days followed. Each morning a servant would place a tray of bread, cheese, pickled vegetables and a jar of water that was to last me the day. They almost always removed the tray untouched in the evening. Thoughts of all-consuming rage, plotting my mother’s death and hoping Andrei would give up his plans of a military career swarmed in my tired mind. Sadly, this was not to happen. Our day of love making by Calvaria Church took place on the 21st of June 1914. Exactly seven days later, in Sarajevo, a young Serbian nationalist assassinated the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne and in the days that followed alliances were formed, armies mobilized and all the peoples of Europe readied themselves for the chance to fight for independence from decadent empires, implement new ideologies and settle old scores. War broke out on July 28th 1914 and with it Andrei’s hopes of a local government post disappeared and instead he and thousands of young men were shipped off to the front lines. The penalty for desertion was death. Four years later, he would tell me that during the unending days in the trenches, caked with mud and fluids seeped from rotting corpses and assaulted by noxious gases, it was only the hope that he would one day hold me in his arms that kept him from putting a rifle in his mouth.

In the early days, people were optimistic, thinking the war would last a few weeks before the nations involved came to their senses, the troops returned home and life continued as it always had. My mother, with her innate ability to foresee and profit from the misery of others, saw the writing on the wall and knew that the empire would dissolve and that it was impossible for people so culturally, linguistically and religiously varied to live in harmony under an impotent and incompetent monarchy. She knew in those first few days, that Transylvania would be absorbed into the Kingdom of Romania in accordance to the will of the ethnic Romanian majority. At that time in Transylvania, Romanians mostly lived on the land tending to orchards and farms and those that lived in cities mostly occupied servile positions in Hungarian and German homes. My mother, a shameless social climber, knew of a few Romanian families that had accumulated vast wealth and places of prominence in society and she knew that after unification with Romania, these families would form the elite upper crust of Cluj society. The husband that she found for me was Bogdan Balan, the wild twenty-three-year-old son of a winery owner with a reputation for alcoholism, compulsive gambling and a temper so bad that despite his striking good looks and enormous wealth, he had not been able to keep a woman by his side, many of them fleeing with split lips and black eyes. This of course did not concern my mother.

Several weeks had passed and I remained captive in my room, praying for Andrei to burst through the door and rescue me. My only notion of what was happening in the world came from bits of news servants whispered in defiance of my mother’s strict forbiddance of any communication. One day in late July, the door opened and fear crippled me when I saw my mother enter carrying a steaming cup of tea and a small cream filled pastry. My mind had become weak and fuzzy from the days of never ending confinement and in a moment a weakness, or perhaps of desperation for affection, I truly believe that my mother wished to make amends.

“Here my darling. This unpleasantness has lasted long enough. It shouldn’t be this way between a mother and daughter. Have some tea and cake and then later you can come down for dinner. We have some guests this evening that will be happy to see you.” She smiled like a perverse clown and handed me the cup of tea.

I thanked her. Perhaps it was the weeks of only stale bread, hard cheese and tepid water, but the sight of warm tea and sweet cream filled cake sent pangs of ravenous hunger through my core and forced a desire to feel the warm soothing liquid fill me and the thick sweet texture of the cream coat my mouth. Forgetting for a moment my mother’s presence, I devoured the cake in two bites and washed it down quickly with a gulp of the fragrant brown liquid. Immediately, a wave of hot nausea washed over me and my body fell insensate on the bed as the ceiling spun in circles above me. My muscles grew lax and my breathing shallow. Before blacking out I saw my mother standing over me her arms folded, her eyes narrowed like a cat’s focused on its prey. This was the first time she showed shamelessly how sick she really was and to what extremes she would go to get what she wanted. We lacked the term at the time, but today she would be called a sociopath.

Over the next few hours I drifted in and out of consciousness. Two servants washed me with a sponge and warm water from a basin, coiffed and dressed me like a china doll. When I was prepared to her liking, my mother slapped me hard across the face and held her hand under my chin, staring directly into my eyes. “Listen to me you disgusting slut. You will do exactly as I tell you and not cause a scene today. I have taken the steps to ensure both of our futures and you will not make a fool of me. If you run, I will find you, and sell you to a whore house where the pimp will treat you far worse than anything you’ve experienced here. Follow my orders and everything will be alright.”

The effect of the drug lessened enough so I could walk, but my thinking was still muddled and I did not have the strength to run. My mother led me down the stairs to the foyer filled with waiting guests. It was then that I understood that I was attending my own wedding party. As we approached the landing, she squeezed my arm painfully hard and told me to smile. My will had been weakened by months of isolation, poor nutrition and the drugged tea, so I did as I was told. Dozens of smiling guests broke out in congratulatory applause and an admittedly handsome young man come forth to take my hand. My mother and the surprise suitor exchanged a glance.

“This is Bogdan, my mother said. “I am quite pleased. You could do no better than him.”

The rest of the afternoon passed in a blur. People kissed my hand and offered praise and congratulations for the happy occasion. My fiancé was ever by my side, making sure a grain of truth, a plea for help, did not slip from my lips. I smiled and said “thank you,” on cue, but my mind was still a blurred mess. As the afternoon grew to a close, both Bogdan and I stood before a court magistrate in the drawing room of my home and with the stroke of a pen and a careless mumbling of the words “I do,” I exchanged one captor for another. The rest of the afternoon was a flash. Perhaps somebody slipped me another dose of a sedative in a hors d’oeuvre or glass of champagne. Though surreal like a dream, I remember a carriage ride to a church where we stood before an altar enveloped in a swirling cloud of incense with a priest chanting and placing a crown on my head and Bogdan sliding a ring on my finger. Any party or reception dinner is lost to oblivion. My last memory was finding myself in a strange bed with Bogdan on top of me claiming his marital privilege , which in today’s society would be tantamount to rape. The physical act was only a flesh and bone manifestation of what had been occurring my entire life, my mother raising me then giving me away for profit no different than a farm animal. Mine was a life lived to the benefit of others. That was the real rape, that of my identity, my soul. After Bogdan finished, her rolled off of me and then everything went black.

The following morning I awoke alone. For the first time since the previous afternoon my head was clear and my thoughts formed at a normal pace without chemical distortion. If not for my new and unfamiliar surroundings, I would have sworn that the preceding day had been some sort of ludicrous dream. Propped up against two overstuffed goose feather pillows on a massive four post bed, I sat for a moment to contemplate this new reality and figure out how quickly I could escape from it. The sound of feet on floor tiles jarred me from my daze and I lifted my head to find the man I had married standing at the foot of the bed. To be fair, Bogdan was and is strikingly beautiful with thick black hair spilling down to his shoulders, café-au-lait colored skin and a body that is relatively short but solid and full of force, though his soul is fetid beyond words. While today he would be considered still a carless youth, in those days he was a successful businessman, the head of a wine and liquor company with connections at the highest levels of the empire’s government, which made him exempt from military conscription. As he stood at the foot of the bed, I could see that his eyes held back a reservoir of craziness, deceit, cunning and manipulation. It seemed that my mother had chosen a younger male version of herself.

“I am Bogdan Balan and you are now Nadejda Balan, my wife.” He smiled. Knowing him as I do now, I’m sure it brought him much delight to know that I had no choice in the matter.

“Where am I?”

“You are still in Cluj, in your new home in the Andrei Muresanu district. All of your things have been moved here and I have instructed the servants to meet your every need. You will be taken care of. The only rule is there must be peaceful coexistence. You must keep up appearances, be my obedient, adoring wife in public, but what you do in private is none of my concern. I have other means of satisfying my needs and you won’t be required even for that.” His remark stupefied me. Perhaps this was going to be easier than I thought with Bogdan leaving me in peace until I could plan my escape or Andrei could return for me. My role would be that of a piece of furniture, a porcelain figure on display, but with nothing expected of me. I would not have to even pretend to care for him. I could not manage to formulate a response. I assented with a quick nod in his direction.

“There is one problem we must take care of, however. Your mother told me that you haven’t bled for two months and last night I noticed a bump while we were in bed.” He stared down at me with his arms crossed, speaking calmly, deliberately enunciating each word to show the gravity of this situation. Never for a moment had the possibility of me being pregnant occurred to me, my head having been filled with images of my own misery, pain and captivity tempered by hope and a longing for Andrei’s return. Bogdan spoke again shaking me from my moment of contemplation. “Nadia, I cannot, I will not, raise another man’s child. We must take care of this problem and live as if this unpleasantness never happened. Two midwives are here,” he cleared his voice, raising his hand to his chin, “to take care of things.”

“No. I won’t let you.” I gathered what strength I could summon from my malnourished body and bolted from the bed, making a dash for the door.

“You don’t have a choice. Your first and only rule is to obey.” My weakened, battered body was no challenge for him to subdue. He grabbed and twisted my arms, pulling, jerking, forcing me down onto the bed. He pinned me there, one knee on my collarbone the other on my lower abdomen wishing to expel the child from within me by the sheer force of his hate. Bogdan fumbled clumsily in his pocket for a brief second and produced a small brown bottle. He emptied the contents, a viscous clear, sweet smelling liquid, onto the pillow beside me and with a rapid jerk he forced my face into the wet spot holding me there for a few seconds. The thought of kicking him in a tender place began to form but before I could execute this action, I saw stars and then blackness.

As I returned to consciousness, I saw an elderly woman through the chloroform induced fog. She spoke to me in Hungarian, her words as soft as the aged skin of her face. “I’m sorry my child. I had to do this. I needed the money for my family. My son and grandsons are at war and my daughters and sick husband sometimes go for days without food. Bogdan offered me much money.” I hated her. Did the knife of poverty cut so hard that she had to inflict misery on an innocent victim? Poverty was something that I had never known, but still misery and unhappiness ruled my life.

“What have I done?” My words were slurred, my drugged tongue not able to articulate the thoughts of my fuzzy mind. “I didn’t ask for this. I have no choices. I never wanted this man, this life. I don’t know him and he’s the one to decree me entire future.”

“Poor child,” she looked down in pity shaking her head slowing, “whoever told you that being a woman was easy?” She patted my forehead and face with a damp cloth. A burning, searing cramp in my lower abdomen brought me back to a state of lucidity. “It is over now. I have put in you a solution of various herbs and bit of lye. You will cramp, and then start to bleed and in a matter of hours you will expel the dead child.” Expel the dead child. Just like a piece of meat. A growth. Something not part of me. An unwanted parasite. I mourned something I hadn’t known existed merely an hour ago, a child, my and Andrei’s child that floated dead inside me. The woman blotted tears from my red face. “You are young. You will be able to have more children. God save you, my child. God save us all.” She made the sign of the cross and gathered her abortifacient instruments into a black leather bag and left.

The cramping was unbearable. The sharp pain cut through what remained of the anesthetic fog. Writhed in agony, I assumed various positions which offered no relief. Sensing the house empty of servants and Bogdan, I rose to my feet, teeth clenched, and walked from room to room in that massive mansion that was my new home. It was impressive for sure. A three story neo baroque structure that would have been more suited for the most posh districts of Budapest or Vienna rather than this provincial city. The finest pieces of art from Europe’s greatest masters hung on the walls and sculptures and vases fashioned in centuries passed in distant lands adorned every corner of every room. Exotic birds chirped away in massive cages set amongst a verdant indoor forest of fragrant tropical plants. By all appearances, I had just entered paradise, yet I had never felt more miserable.

Two hours later I expelled my and Andrei’s child into the toilet of the first floor bathroom. A linen cloth spread on the floor between my legs was dyed red from the massive flow of blood and other liquids that poured from me. He was tiny, and although nowhere near fully developed, I knew it was a boy, this hairless almost translucent pink thing that floated in the toilet, his tiny geckoesque hands clenched as if in a fight for his life, a fight which ultimately he lost. My hand rose to the dangling chain ready to pull it and send my dead son hurdling down the pipes to a watery grave, but instinct took over and I scooped him out of the scarlet toilet water, lifted him to my lips and gently kissed his cold, slimy body, already rigid with death. An empty prayer escaped my lips, which was all my soul could muster, asking that his spirit find a happier place. A pickling jar from the root cellar filled to the rim with rubbing alcohol would serve as a coffin. For months I kept my dead son in the back of the bedroom wardrobe, often picking up the jar and holding it on days when Bogdan was not there, staring at his unopened eyes and forever clenched fists allowing him to serve as a reminder that if only for one day, the day of his conception, I had been truly happy. Several months later, Bogdan hired a construction crew to remodel the foyer. One day, when the crew was taking a lunch break, I placed the jar containing my son between two walls that were about to be plastered, knowing it was time to reclaim my life and let his weak spirit go, as Earth was no longer where he belonged. The house still stands today, as municipal government offices and I assume my son is still entombed somewhere in its walls.

Bogdan was true to his word. He did not much care about my comings or goings. Rarely did we eat dinner together, sleep in the same bed or exchange more than a few words. Whenever he needed to make a public appearance of attend a formal dinner, I was there by his side, smiling empty meaningless smiles. Servants waited on me and despite living in a time of war we had every luxury at our disposal. We lived together in that house for four years, and I did not have sex with him more than three times, once admittedly out of loneliness and a vain hope that perhaps things could be different. His tastes in sexual companionship tended more toward the dark the unsettling. There were evenings when I found him in our drawing room beating a woman brutally with a whip before urinating into her fresh wounds, or forcing two young peasant girls to lick each other’s wet parts while he watched and pleasured himself. On one occasion I walked in on him with a Gypsy boy in our bed. Such acts were seen as infernal in those days, but I quickly became jaded to the twisted reality around me. It was easier to survive this way. I smiled, played the role of the dutiful wife and turned a blind eye to my husband’s narcissistic depravity. Had I run, I would not have gotten far. The community would have shunned me and without Bogdan’s consent I would have had no access to money. The memory of Andrei and his promise preserved my sanity in the early days. As the months turned to years, I had all but given up hope of ever seeing Andrei, but he did in the end keep his promise. One night in late autumn of 1918, he returned and brought with him the curse that I carry with me today. This is where my story really begins.

Next Chapter: Coming Next Sunday

My new book series, Princes of Eternity’s first installment, Belle Epoque will be available to purchase on November 30th, Saint Andrew’s Day. I can’t wait for you to read it!

The November Vampires copyright 2012 by James Duvalier. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Thank you for taking the time to visit us at The Night Visitors Vampire Research Society Vampire Chronicles Publication. If you have any personal experiences with vampires you’d like to share, or if you have any suggestions as to which aspects of vampirism you’d like to see explored in blog posts and YouTube videos, please email us at thenightvisitorsvrs@gmail.com.

You can also connect with fellow Night Visitors from around the world when you join my Facebook group

To watch the Night Visitor’s Vampire Research Society’s true stories, subscribe to the YouTube channel @VampireResearchSociety, or visit my website at thenightvisitors.com

Serialized Fiction, Fiction, Vampires, Gothic Horror, Vampire Fiction

The November Vampires: Chapter Two was originally published in The Night Visitors Chronicles on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Across the world and throughout history, the relationship between the living and the dead has rarely been understood as a clean severance. Death, in many traditional cultures, is a transition, not a termination. The dead move into another state of being, but they do not disappear from the web of obligation, love, and reciprocity that connected them to the living. In fact, many traditions hold that the dead still need us and have not truly left us behind.

This is the foundation of ancestor veneration: the understanding that the living and the dead exist in an ongoing, mutual relationship. Embedded within that understanding is something darker, something that speaks directly to the central theme of The Night Visitors. When that relationship breaks down, when the dead are forgotten, neglected, abandoned, or when they leave this world in a violent or unholy way and go unaided by prayer, the consequences can be unsettling. In some traditions, neglected souls grow restless. They may wander or hunger. They take on qualities that folklore, across many cultures, has long associated with the unquiet dead. The dead with an insatiable need or a presence that disturbs rather than protects.

To be clear, this is not to say that a forgotten soul becomes a vampire. Vampires, energetic or otherwise, are only one of many entities we find in folklore, and the relationship between neglected spirits and vampiric entities is one of resonance, not identity.

Eastern European traditions offered different explanations for the vampire. Folklore scholarship describes vampires as corporeal revenants, but also records cases in which the returning entity was understood as the deceased person’s spirit. Polish traditions additionally included explanations involving two souls — sometimes a soulless body becoming inhabited by a demon, in which case it is not the soul of the deceased person that rises from the grave. Thus, it is worth noting how often the same logic applies in disparate cultures and religions around the world, which is made manifest in the belief that the dead require tending, and that failure to care for them can carry a cost.

The idea that improper care of the dead leads to spiritual trouble is widespread. In Virgil’s Aeneid, drawing on Ancient Greek underworld traditions, the unburied dead are denied passage to the underworld by Charon and are condemned to wander the banks of the river Styx for a hundred years before they can cross.

In many West African traditions, a spirit that has not been properly sent off through funerary ritual cannot join the community of ancestors and becomes instead a lost, potentially harmful presence. Among the Akan of Ghana, funerary treatment and the circumstances of death can shape the deceased’s relationship with the living. Appropriate rites matter, but what counts as appropriate depends on the kind of death and the community’s traditions.

In some Slavic and Romanian traditions, certain circumstances of death or burial were associated with dangerous revenants. Although specifics vary from region to region, generally a soul that had not received proper burial rites, or that died under certain circumstances (suicide, excommunication, a violent or untimely death), risked becoming an unclean spirit: a nechistu, a strigoi, something that returned to trouble the living rather than rest in peace.

What is clear is that the dead need help crossing over, settling in, and finding peace. Without help, something can go wrong. The restless dead are not evil by nature; they simply need help, and the living hold the power to do that.

Purification Before Heaven

In Catholic theology, Purgatory is a transitory state of purification through which souls pass before entering Heaven. It is the opportunity for a soul who died in God’s grace but remains not yet purified of all sin to be cleansed. In the Church’s understanding, it is a form of mercy. Catholic doctrine encourages the living to actively assist the souls there through prayer, indulgences, the offering of Mass, almsgiving, and acts of penance performed with the intention of benefiting the dead. All of these are understood to shorten or ease the purification of souls in Purgatory, and through assistance, as the communion of saints connects the living and the dead in a bond that prayer can traverse.

In the Catholic calendar, November is the Month of the Holy Souls. All Saints’ Day is celebrated on November 1st, honoring the saints in Heaven, and on the 2nd, All Souls’ Day, turns our attention to those still in Purgatory and the living’s responsibility toward them. Throughout the month, Catholics are encouraged to visit cemeteries, have Masses offered for the dead, and pray the Office of the Dead to gain indulgences that can be applied to souls in Purgatory. If you haven’t heard of the Office of the Dead before, it is a set of liturgical prayers for the deceased (psalms, readings, responses); it is commonly included in funeral rites and on All Souls’ Day. This is not superstition. It is a theology of solidarity, the understanding that love does not end at death, and that prayer is a real act with real effects beyond the grave.

Liberation & Rebirth

In Tibetan Buddhist tradition, the Bardo, most famously described in the Bardo Thodol, commonly known in the West as the Tibetan Book of the Dead, are intermediate states in which consciousness may attain liberation or proceed toward rebirth following corporeal death. It is not a place of punishment or reward but a kind of psychic journey, in which the consciousness of the deceased encounters a series of visions and experiences that determine the nature of its next rebirth or liberation.

The Bardo is understood to last up to forty-nine days, and during this time the living can assist the dying and the dead in navigating it. Monks read aloud from the Bardo Thodol to guide the consciousness of the deceased through what it will encounter. Prayers, rituals, and offerings made by the living are understood to generate merit that can benefit the dead. The tradition holds that the deceased remains in a state in which it can be influenced, that it is not beyond reach. This is a profound statement: that the living, through intentional spiritual practice, can reach across the threshold of death and offer genuine help. Though the cosmology differs entirely from Catholic Purgatory, it is remarkably similar. The dead are not gone, the living are not helpless, and the relationship between the two continues to be active and meaningful.

Ancestral Reciprocity

Many African-diasporic and Spiritist traditions of the Americas (Vodou, Candomblé, Santería, Lucumí, and some forms of Espiritismo) place a high value on the relationships between the living and the dead and are considered foundational, intimate, and highly practical parts of spiritual life. The ancestors are not distant or abstract. They are present, active members of the community, separated from the living by the thinnest of veils.

They are honored with offerings of food, drink, candles, flowers, and tobacco, which are placed at dedicated altars or shrines called boveda in Espiritismo or ile egun in Yoruba tradition. Prayers are offered, their names are spoken aloud, their stories are kept alive. The logic is direct: as the ancestors cared for the living during their lifetimes, the living continue to care for the ancestors in return. This reciprocity is not transactional in a cold sense; it is familial. The ancestors, properly honored, protect their descendants, bring blessings, open roads, and offer guidance. Neglected, they may grow troubled, and a troubled ancestor spirit can be a source of misfortune, illness, or confusion in the lives of the living. Therefore, it is to your benefit to have a positive relationship based in mutual respect and service with your ancestors and spirit guides.

Hungry Ghosts

In Chinese folk religion, the seventh lunar month is known as Ghost Month. The gates of the underworld are understood to open during this period, allowing the spirits of the dead to return to the world of the living.

Most of these returning spirits are ancestors who are honored and welcomed, but among them are another class of spirit known as the hungry ghosts, spirits who, for various reasons (dying without descendants, being forgotten, having died violently, without proper rites, or beings who died with karmic debt due to greed and stinginess), have no one to care for them and receive no help from those still on earth.

The Hungry Ghost Festival, observed on the fifteenth day of the seventh lunar month, is in large part an act of communal charity toward these neglected spirits. Offerings of food, paper money, incense, and goods are burned so that their essence reaches the spirit world. Performances and ceremonies are held, sometimes with empty front-row seats reserved for the spirits. The point is to feed and pacify souls that might otherwise become restless, or worse, predatory.

The hungry ghost, filled with need and unable to satisfy it, is one of the most vivid images in the East Asian spiritual cosmology of what neglect does to the dead. It is an image of suffering, but also a call to action for the living.

Easing the Passage Through Offerings

Kan Ben, and the culminating fifteenth day of Pchum Ben, is a Cambodian festival, observed in September or October, in which the living make offerings of rice and sticky cakes, bai ben, to the dead. The offerings are brought to temples before dawn, when the spirits of the ancestors are understood to gather. Buddhist monks chant prayers throughout the night on behalf of the dead, and the offerings are understood to reach not only your own ancestors but also those with no one left to remember them.

The festival combines Buddhist ideas of karma, rebirth, and merit with indigenous Khmer ancestral traditions. Some of the spirits of the dead remain in a state of wandering for some time after death, and the merit generated by the prayers and offerings of the living can ease their passage. And some suffering ancestral spirits are temporarily released to seek offerings, while the living make merit and dedicate it to the deceased.

To neglect Pchum Ben, leaving your ancestors unfed and unpraised, is understood in Cambodian tradition to invite misfortune. The ancestors may not be able to reach the living to offer blessings if they have not themselves received what they need.

The Bonds Between Us in Life and Death

What all of these traditions share is not superstition but a profoundly humane understanding of what death is and what community means. The dead are not simply gone. The living are not simply waiting to join them. There is a relationship that is ongoing, active, and mutual, that asks something of both sides.

The living are asked to remember by speaking their names, lighting candles, making offerings, and saying prayers. The dead, in return, offer protection, blessing, guidance, and intercession. This is a cosmology in which love persists across the threshold of death, and in which the neglect of that love carries real consequences, not punishment, but the natural result of a relationship allowed to wither.

I practice this myself. I offer prayers, indulgences, Masses, and candles for the dead, for my own departed, and for souls who may have no one left to remember them. It is a practice I came to through faith and have stayed with through experience. I believe, with real conviction, that it has brought blessings into my life that I cannot fully account for otherwise.

Are there any rituals, traditions, or holidays in your culture or in your part of the world to commemorate and help the dead? I would love to hear about them here!

Thank you for taking the time to visit us at The Night Visitors Vampire Research Society Vampire Chronicles Publication. If you have any personal experiences with vampires you’d like to share, or if you have any suggestions as to which aspects of vampirism you’d like to see explored in blog posts and YouTube videos, please email us at thenightvisitorsvrs@gmail.com.

You can also connect with fellow Night Visitors from around the world when you join my Facebook group

To watch the Night Visitor’s Vampire Research Society’s true stories, subscribe to the YouTube channel @VampireResearchSociety, or visit my website at thenightvisitors.com

Offerings and Ancestral Care: How Cultures Around the World Care for Their Departed and Why It… was originally published in The Night Visitors Chronicles on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Kali’s Embrace

Autumn is a season of longing for things past, a purgatorial stretch of damp gray days to mourn lovers, friends and our own dreams that have faded into oblivion like the unremembered dead carried off by the winds of bad change. On one such day a boy waits inside an empty bar in Provincetown, Massachusetts tediously counting the minutes as the sky outside fades to darker shades of ash and the cobblestone streets grow moist with the salted mist of a New England evening. He knows the vampire will find him and that tonight will put an end to a story that has played out for almost a century.

The vampire arrives shortly after sundown having left the crypt in a crumbling colonial graveyard where has spent the day among the dusty bones of puritan settlers who would gauge their eyes from their faces should they see the condom and ecstasy littered Sodom that was once their New Jerusalem. He walks the streets weaving through the few tourists that remain this late in the season and makes his way to a building on Commercial Street where a sign in red lettering reads: Kali’s Embrace: A Place for the Unloved. This is where the trail ends. Her scent has brought him here and it permeates the centenarian wood of this establishment. Nadia has been here. She will learn this time that she can never leave, that he will always find her. She will finally learn to obey and care for him as she was commanded to almost one hundred years ago when they last walked under the sun.

The vampire lets himself in through the unlocked door. A gentle voice greets him from across the darkened room.

“Nadia is gone. She left two weeks ago.”

The vampire observes the boy seated on the barstool who brushes back his shaggy emo hair in one quick movement to reveal eyes of deepest crystal. The vampire is not at all like the dark villain of classic film. No flowing cape, lace shirt cuffs or sparkling jeweled medallions, only jeans, a hoodie and thick, black shoulder length hair held in place by sunglasses.

“Who are you?” The vampire asks, drawing closer.

“My name is Yuri, and you must be Bogdan.”

“Yes. How do you know who I am and more importantly how do you know Nadia?” The vampire approaches Yuri, gently brushing his icy hand against the boy’s marble smooth cheek, a gesture that says I own you.

“We were lovers,” says Yuri. “I came in one night and she knew without asking that I needed a place to stay. She let me stay with her and we became close. She loved me. I know everything about your past with her-where she comes from and how she became what she is.”

“She loved you? And where is she now, Yuri? Nadia cannot love. She is beautiful, for sure, but cold and empty. She sees people as prey, toys to play with and always replaceable. You’re no different. I have no doubt that she held you close to her each night, nipping at your neck and wrists taping the youthful blood in your veins and using your warm body to bring her to fits of ecstasy, and honestly I can’t say that I blame her.”

Bogdan stood next to Yuri with his arm resting across his back. The boy’s delicate body exuded warmth and an intoxicating scent that Bogdan could not quite identify. A scent of magnolia blossoms, almonds, holy incense and countless herbs combined in an ancient tincture so powerful and sacrosanct that to taste it was to see paradise. Yuri was not like most people. He was special, irresistible, the mere scent of him intoxicating. Bogdan composed himself and looked away from the pulsating jugular which called to him mercilessly.

“The fact is, Yuri, Nadia is gone and you will never see her again. She doesn’t care about you. This is what she does. I’ve known her longer than you and I can tell you that her place is with me. I am the only one that can control her like she needs. Will you tell me where she went?”

“To Cluj.”

“Cluj? Neither of us has spent more than a few days there since we left a hundred years ago.”

“She didn’t tell me she was leaving. I woke up one night and she left me the deed to the club with a note saying we couldn’t be together anymore. I didn’t know where she was until two days ago when a package arrived.”

Yuri retrieved a courier envelope from behind the bar. Inside was a stack of papers bound together by a single red ribbon.

“It’s her story, your story too. She tells about your marriage, about Andrei and Calina and everything that happened that night. I know how dangerous you are. She warned me about you, told me to leave, but I can’t. I have nowhere to go and nobody cares about me.”

“You are stupid, Yuri, too much like Nadia. You will never find love just as she never has, because it doesn’t exist. The world wants to use you, suck you dry and leave you with nothing. Love is a perverse lie, something you promise people to get them to do what you want. That’s a sad lesson you need to learn, not that it will be much use to you now. You will die tonight. You know too much about me and that’s a dangerous thing.”

“I know you will kill me, Bogdan, and I don’t care, but it’s still early. The club is closed and nobody will be here tonight. You can’t possibly make it to Cluj in one night, so please stay a few hours. You can drink my blood and I’ll read Nadia’s story.” Bogdan smiled with approval at Yuri’s suggestion.

“Very good. I’ll sip your blood and listen to you read my wife’s deranged ramblings. Why should Nadia be the only one to enjoy you? Tonight you will be my Scheherazade, but let me warn you, I bore easily and sucking you dry is a tempting alternative to a boring tale, especially one I’ve lived myself, but I am curious to hear it in Nadia’s words. Also, unlike Scheherazade, you have no hope of being set free. When this night is over, so is your life.”

Yuri nodded and motioned in the direction of a red velvet sofa in the corner of the room that would have been more at home in an old western whorehouse than a New England Goth club. They sat together and Yuri unbound the packet of hand written pages. He cuddled up against Bogdan’s hard, cold body, hoping to ingratiate himself to his captor and began to read a story to which he already knew the ending while making a silent prayer that the night would unfold as he had planned.

Next Chapter: Coming Next Sunday

My new book series, Princes of Eternity’s first installment, Belle Epoque will be available to purchase on November 30th, Saint Andrew’s Day. I can’t wait for you to read it.

The November Vampires copyright 2012 by James Duvalier. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Thank you for taking the time to visit us at The Night Visitors Vampire Research Society Vampire Chronicles Publication. If you have any personal experiences with vampires you’d like to share, or if you have any suggestions as to which aspects of vampirism you’d like to see explored in blog posts and YouTube videos, please email us at thenightvisitorsvrs@gmail.com.

You can also connect with fellow Night Visitors from around the world when you join my Facebook group

To watch the Night Visitor’s Vampire Research Society’s true stories, subscribe to the YouTube channel @VampireResearchSociety, or visit my website at thenightvisitors.com

Serialized Fiction, Fiction, Vampires, Gothic Horror, Vampire Fiction

The November Vampires: Kali’s Embrace was originally published in The Night Visitors Chronicles on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

For several years running, we have gathered in the spirit of the season to do what we loved most — tell vampire stories.

The idea is simple. Each of us writes an original vampire story and shares it with the group at our Halloween get-together. There are no rules about length or style. Some stories are chilling. Some are darkly funny. Some lean into the classic gothic atmosphere; others are more grounded or set in everyday places where something ancient and unsettling had quietly taken up residence. What they all have in common is that they come from a genuine love of vampire lore, not just the pop culture versions, but the older, stranger traditions that have haunted human imagination for centuries.

Reading the stories aloud around a table, is genuinely magical. A story told in our voice, in real time, cannot be replicated, not in a book for a film.

We make sure the table reflects the occasion as it is decorated in deep crimson and black with flickering candles. The food and drinks, of course are themed too. The atmosphere matters as much as the menu, and getting both right makes the whole evening feel like a proper ritual.

For anyone looking to recreate this kind of evening, one of the go to drinks for such an occasion is The Vampire’s Kiss, a blood-red vodka martini with a sweet-tart berry flavor that looks every bit as dramatic as it tastes. Chambord, the French black raspberry liqueur at its heart, brings an intensely concentrated raspberry flavor with subtle citrus notes and just enough sweetness to balance the tartness. Add an optional cube of dry ice and the effect is genuinely theatrical, the kind of drink that incites a reaction the moment you set it down.

It can be prepared in a large pitcher ahead of time, which makes it practical for a party, and it scales easily for a crowd. The recipe, adapted from A Couple Cooks, is shared below.

Vampire’s Kiss Adapted from A Couple Cooks

Ingredients

Per serving:

• 1½ oz vodka
• ¾ oz Chambord
• ½ oz fresh lemon juice
• Ice
• Optional: a small cube of dry ice for dramatic effect

Instructions

Add the vodka, Chambord, and lemon juice to a cocktail shaker filled with ice. Shake vigorously for about 15 seconds until very cold. Strain into a chilled martini or coupe glass. If using dry ice, drop a small cube in just before serving — handle with tongs or gloves, never bare hands. Garnish with fresh raspberries, a twist of lemon peel, or a Halloween-themed touch of your choosing.

To make ahead: Mix the vodka, Chambord, and lemon juice in a pitcher and refrigerate up to 8 hours in advance. Shake with ice and strain into glasses just before serving.

Whether you are hosting a gathering of friends to share stories or simply settling in with a good vampire film and some suitably themed snacks, there is something deeply satisfying about embracing the season.

Thank you for taking the time to visit us at The Night Visitors Vampire Research Society Vampire Chronicles Publication. If you have any personal experiences with vampires you’d like to share, or if you have any suggestions as to which aspects of vampirism you’d like to see explored in blog posts and YouTube videos, please email us at thenightvisitorsvrs@gmail.com.

You can also connect with fellow Night Visitors from around the world when you join my Facebook group

To watch the Night Visitor’s Vampire Research Society’s true stories, subscribe to the YouTube channel @VampireResearchSociety, or visit my website at thenightvisitors.com

Elixir of the Undead & The Art of the Halloween Party Drink: A Vampire’s Kiss was originally published in The Night Visitors Chronicles on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Every autumn, vampires emerge from the shadows, appearing on costumes, decorations, and movie screens as if they have always belonged to Halloween. The fangs, bloodlust, and dark allure are a natural fit for a celebration of all things spooky. Yet, vampires have not traditionally been associated with the holiday. In fact, vampires as part of Halloween are a relatively recent development. Honestly, this makes the season even more special for me, as I am passionate about vampire folklore and story, and Halloween has always been my favorite holiday.

For me, it’s never really been about the candy, costumes, or horror movies in the theatres or streaming online; it’s about the whole season of Hallowtide, three consecutive days that feel deeply sacred to me, with Halloween on October 31st, All Saints’ Day on November 1st, and All Souls’ Day on November 2nd. The season reminds me of loved ones who have crossed over to the other side and the truth I hold onto — death is not the end of anything but simply a change of where and how one exists. Where the connection between people in the physical and spiritual worlds still remains, and for a few days the veil between the two worlds is lifted.

The more secular side of Halloween celebrates all things spooky and macabre, so it makes sense that vampires would figure prominently in the imagery of the season, but what makes the vampire’s place in Halloween interesting is the newness of their association with the holiday, because for most of Halloween’s history, vampires weren’t a part of it at all.

Before the Vampire

Halloween, as we know it today, is closely tied to Samhain, the Gaelic festival marking the end of summer and the beginning of the dark half of the year. In Irish tradition, Samhain was a liminal time, when the boundary between this world and the Otherworld grew thin, and the dead and other spirits could cross. In later Irish and Scottish custom, it was marked with bonfires, divination, and guising (going door to door in disguise), and the spirits associated with Samhain included fairies and the visiting souls of the dead; vampires were not among them.

The Christian calendar also had its own season of the dead. In the 8th century, Pope Gregory III moved the Feast of All Saints, which had been celebrated in May, to November 1st, and Pope Gregory IV later extended it to the whole Church. Samhain and the Christian feasts of All Saints’ Day (November 1st) and All Souls’ Day (November 2nd) fell in the same season, and their customs are thought to have influenced each other. The word “Halloween” itself is a contraction of “All Hallows’ Eve,” meaning the Eve of All Saints.

Irish and Scottish immigrants carried the celebration of Halloween to North America in the 19th century, and the holiday slowly evolved into the commercialized, costume-driven celebration we recognize today. And still, the vampire, as we understand it, came from somewhere else entirely and had nothing to do with Samhain or Hallowtide.

How Hollywood Brought the Vampire to Halloween

The moment vampires began their migration into Halloween, I’d argue, came in 1931 when Universal Pictures’ Dracula, directed by Tod Browning and starring Bela Lugosi in the title role, took the nation by storm. The film was a sensation. Lugosi’s interpretation of the Count, with his slicked-back hair, the formal evening wear, the sweeping opera cloak, and his hypnotic gaze, became the definitive image of the vampire almost overnight, and the vampire, thanks mostly to Bela Lugosi, gained a prominent place in Halloween imagery to the point of becoming an icon of the holiday itself.

The association deepened through the 1950s and into the 1970s. Hammer Film Productions, the British studio that reinvented Gothic horror for a new generation, produced a string of Dracula films starring Christopher Lee, who added a brooding, dangerous sexuality to the role that Lugosi had made iconic. While Lugosi was theatrical and hypnotic, Lee was physically imposing and genuinely frightening. He was a creature of appetites barely concealed beneath aristocratic clothing. It was also during this era that the vampire made the leap from screen to storefront.

Store-bought Halloween costumes had been on the market since the 1920s and 1930s, but by the 1950s and 1960s, Ben Cooper and Collegeville were licensing film and television characters, Universal’s classic monsters among them, and selling them, typically a vinyl smock and plastic mask in a box, at five-and-dime and department stores across America. The vampire had become not just a cinematic figure but a driver of consumerism, its image accessible to any child who wanted to spend an October evening as a child of the night.

The aforementioned films, combined with television’s growing appetite for horror programming, kept vampires in the public eye year-round, and their popularity was punctuated around Halloween. The vampire was already moving from monster toward tragic antihero some years before, particularly with the introduction of Barnabas Collins in Dark Shadows in 1966. And by the time Anne Rice published Interview with the Vampire in 1976 the vampire was no longer just a frightening cinematic monster; it was a lens through which to examine mortality, loneliness, and what it means to live outside the bounds and limitations of human time. Our cultural love affair with vampire fiction and film firmly established the vampire as one of Halloween’s central figures. In 1992, Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula premiered, cementing the creature in our culture as he revived the Gothic vampire as a figure of tragic romance and sensuality.

Late to the Party

The vampire was never a creature of Samhain nor was it a part of Hallowtide in any theological or cultural sense. Yet, there is something fitting about the vampire’s association with this particular time of year. Its popularity and association with Halloween grew through the years as it found itself bound to a moment when folkloric traditions, commercial cinema, and American consumer culture converged. Halloween, at its roots, is a season of reckoning with death. It is a time when the boundary between the living and the dead is acknowledged. Hallowtide is a time when we are invited to think about what lies beyond the visible world, and the vampire is fundamentally a creature that exists beyond this boundary.

Thank you for taking the time to visit us at The Night Visitors Vampire Research Society Vampire Chronicles Publication. If you have any personal experiences with vampires you’d like to share, or if you have any suggestions as to which aspects of vampirism you’d like to see explored in blog posts and YouTube videos, please email us at thenightvisitorsvrs@gmail.com.

You can also connect with fellow Night Visitors from around the world when you join my Facebook group

To watch the Night Visitor’s Vampire Research Society’s true stories, subscribe to the YouTube channel @VampireResearchSociety, or visit my website at thenightvisitors.com

If you liked this article you might want to read my article on Dark Shadows:

The Gothic Revolution of Collinsport, a Pop Culture Vampire and the Women of Dark Shadows

Or my article on Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice:

My memories of and reflections on Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire

How Vampires Stole Halloween: From Gaelic Folklore to Hollywood Icon was originally published in The Night Visitors Chronicles on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Anyone who knows me knows that Halloween, All Saints’ Day, and November All Souls’ Day — Hallowtide — is my favorite time of the year. This whole stretch from the last day of October into the opening days of November has always felt different to me from any other time of the year, and I don’t just mean in a festive sense. I genuinely believe that during these days the veil between the living and the dead is thinner than at any other time, that our loved ones who have passed on are closer to us and more present than they are during the rest of the twelve months, and that the ancient traditions we observe during this season, whether we are conscious of it or not, exist precisely because human beings across many cultures and many centuries have sensed that same closeness to the other side, albeit at different times of the year depending on the local tradition.

The Warmth Beyond the Veil

Here at The Night Visitors we talk a great deal about vampires and malevolent spirits, about the entities we defend ourselves against and the traditions that keep them at bay, but the dead are not only something to be feared. Most of what comes through during Hallowtide are not monsters. They are our grandmothers, our fathers, our old friends, the people who loved us and whom we loved, and it seems right to me that at least once in a while we turn our attention not to defense against dark unwelcome spirits but to welcoming kind and benevolent visitors from the other side.

Which brings me to today’s recipe, and to one of the most beautiful food traditions I know of anywhere in the world.

The Roots of Pan de Muerto

Pan de Muerto, bread of the dead, is a traditional Mexican sweet bread prepared in the weeks leading up to Día de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead, which is observed on November 1st and 2nd. It is a soft, lightly enriched dough, fragrant with orange zest and anise, shaped into a rounded loaf and decorated on top with strips of dough formed into the shape of bones, arranged in a cross, with a small round ball at the center that variously represents a skull, a teardrop, or a heart, depending on the regional tradition. The whole loaf is finished with a generous dusting of white sugar.

The tradition of placing bread on graves and altars for the dead comes from Spain. The pan de ánimas, soul bread, was prepared in Castile, Aragon, Portugal, and Sicily for All Saints’ and All Souls’ Day, blessed by the local priest and placed on graves alongside wine and flowers. When Spanish missionaries arrived in Mexico during the colonial period, they brought this practice with them, and it merged with existing indigenous beliefs around honoring the dead, eventually producing the pan de muerto we know today, with its particular shape and flavor that belong entirely to Mexico.

The loaf placed on a family’s ofrenda, the home altar set up to welcome back the dead, is understood as food for the returning soul, offered alongside candles, marigolds, the deceased’s favorite foods and objects. The dead, it is believed, return to visit during these days and are nourished by the fragrance and the love contained in what is placed out for them.

Setting the Table for The Night Visitors

Now, does pan de muerto have anything to do with vampires? Directly, no. The tradition is about welcoming, not warding off, but for those of us who spend time thinking about the relationship between the living and the dead, who take seriously the idea that certain times of year bring the two worlds into closer contact, it seems to me entirely in the spirit of The Night Visitors to also think about how we receive the dead who come back to us with good intentions, how we set a table for them, how we make them feel at home. Not everything connected to this season needs to be about spooky or dark forces. Sometimes it’s about a connection lasting beyond the grave and the reality of immortality.

Traditional Pan de Muerto Recipe

I definitely recommend baking this bread if you have not done so before. It is not a difficult recipe, though like all yeasted breads it requires patience, and the results are extraordinary both as something to enjoy by yourself or with friends, or as an offering to be placed on your ofrenda or taken to the cemetery.

Ingredients:

• 3 ¾ cups all-purpose flour, plus more for dusting
• ½ cup white sugar, plus extra for topping
• 1 teaspoon kosher salt
• 2 ¼ teaspoons active dry yeast (one standard packet)
• ½ cup whole milk, warmed
• ¼ cup water, warmed
• 3 large eggs, at room temperature
• Zest of one large orange
• 1 teaspoon anise seeds
• ½ cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, softened and cut into pieces
• 4 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted, for finishing
• Extra white sugar for the topping

Instructions:

In a small bowl, combine the warm milk, warm water, and yeast with a pinch of the sugar and let it sit for about 10 minutes, until it foams and bubbles. This tells you the yeast is alive.

In the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the dough hook, combine the flour, sugar, salt, orange zest, and anise seeds. Add the yeast mixture and the eggs and mix on low speed until a shaggy dough forms, about 2 minutes. With the mixer running on medium, add the softened butter a piece at a time, waiting until each piece is incorporated before adding the next. Once all the butter is in, knead the dough on medium speed for about 8 to 10 minutes, until it is smooth, elastic, and slightly tacky but not sticky. If you do not have a stand mixer, this can be done by hand — it will take about 12 to 15 minutes of kneading and a bit of effort.

Shape the dough into a ball and place it in a lightly oiled bowl, cover with plastic wrap or a clean dish towel, and let it rise in a warm spot until doubled in size, which will take about 1 to 1 ½ hours. You can also place it in the refrigerator overnight at this stage, which makes the dough easier to handle and develops the flavor nicely.

When the dough has risen, turn it out onto a lightly floured surface. Pinch off about one quarter of the dough and set it aside. This is for the bone decorations. Divide the remaining three quarters into two equal pieces and shape each into a smooth ball, pressing down gently to form a round about six inches across. Place these on a parchment-lined baking sheet.

From the reserved dough, form two small balls for the centers, then roll the remainder into four ropes, pinching them at intervals to suggest the knobbed shape of bones. Lay two ropes across each loaf in a cross, pressing gently to adhere, and place a small dough ball at the center where they meet. Cover the loaves loosely and let them rise again for about 45 minutes to an hour, until noticeably puffed.

Preheat your oven to 350°F. Bake the loaves for 35 to 40 minutes, until they are deep golden brown and sound hollow when tapped on the bottom. If they are browning too quickly on top, cover loosely with foil for the last 15 minutes of baking.

Remove from the oven and let them cool for about 20 minutes. Then brush generously with the melted butter, doing it in sections and immediately dusting each section with sugar, so the sugar sticks before the butter dries, until the entire loaf is coated and sparkling. Transfer to a wire rack to cool completely before slicing.

Pan de Muerto is wonderful with Mexican hot chocolate. Place one loaf on your altar if you have one, leave it through the night of November 2nd, and know that the fragrance alone is understood, in this tradition, as nourishment for whoever comes back to find it.

How do you honor the quiet side of Hallowtide?

Whether you set up a traditional ofrenda, light a single candle on November 1st, or carry on a family baking tradition, we’d love to hear how you welcome benevolent spirits into your home during this season. Leave a comment below and share your favorite Hallowtide ritual or recipe!

Thank you for taking the time to visit us at The Night Visitors Vampire Research Society Vampire Chronicles Publication. If you have any personal experiences with vampires you’d like to share, or if you have any suggestions as to which aspects of vampirism you’d like to see explored in blog posts and YouTube videos, please email us at thenightvisitorsvrs@gmail.com.

You can also connect with fellow Night Visitors from around the world when you join my Facebook group

To watch the Night Visitor’s Vampire Research Society’s true stories, subscribe to the YouTube channel @VampireResearchSociety, or visit my website at thenightvisitors.com

The comforting Mexican tradition of Day of the Dead bread: Pan de Muerto was originally published in The Night Visitors Chronicles on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Hollywood painted an unforgettable picture of a vampire, and it wasn’t Bram Stoker’s Count Dracula. The widow’s peak, the cape with its stiff upturned collar, accompanied by the slow, formal cadence of a voice that seemed to savor every syllable was none other than Bela Lugosi. His image is emblazoned in our memories, and more than ninety-five years after he first stepped in front of Tod Browning’s cameras, Lugosi’s iconic Dracula set the tone for every subsequent vampire, whether reverent or parodic. Halloween costumes still default to his silhouette. Sesame Street’s puppet Count von Count is unmistakably his voice. That kind of cultural ownership is rare, and it came at a cost Lugosi spent the rest of his life paying.

Béla Blaskó of Lugos

Béla Ferenc Dezső Blaskó was born on October 20, 1882, in Lugos, a market town in the Banat region of the Kingdom of Hungary. Today the town is called Lugoj, and it sits inside Romania’s Timiș County, a detail that gets repeated so often it has become a kind of trivia shorthand, as though Lugosi were secretly Romanian and Dracula found him rather than the other way around. The truth is more interesting. Lugos in the 1880s was a genuinely mixed town, with Hungarian, Romanian, German, Serbian, and Jewish communities living in close proximity to one another so that a boy running errands would have heard several languages in the space of a single day. Lugosi’s own family identified as Hungarian. His father István was a banker. His mother Paula de Vojnić was of Serbian descent, and Béla was raised speaking Hungarian as his native language. Whether he ever became conversant in Romanian, Serbian, or German is one of those questions the historical record simply doesn’t answer clearly. It’s plausible he picked up fragments or even developed advanced fluency in any of these languages as a child in a polyglot town might. However, biographers generally describe him as monolingual in Hungarian until adulthood. He would later take “Lugosi” as his stage name specifically to honor the town he left behind, suggesting that the place deeply mattered to him.

Leaving Home

Leaving his home behind came early and hard. At eleven or twelve, Lugosi walked away from school and from his father’s plans for him, taking work wherever he could find it, including, by his own later account, a stretch in a coal mine. His true interest led him to the stage. Working his way up through provincial theaters in the early 1900s, ultimately he landed at Budapest’s National Theatre, where he performed from 1913 to 1919, including a run of Shakespearean roles that he later used to back up his claim, accurately or not, that he’d been a leading man of Hungary’s national stage.

World War I interrupted his acting career; he served as an infantry officer on the Russian front, was wounded, and received a medal for it. When he returned to the stage afterward, he also stepped into politics, helping organize an actors’ union during Béla Kun’s short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic. When that government collapsed in 1919, actors who had supported it became targets. Lugosi fled first to Vienna, then to Berlin, where he found steady work in Weimar-era silent films before deciding, in late 1920, to try his luck in America. He crossed the Atlantic as a crewman on a merchant ship and landed in New Orleans that December, making his way north to New York.

Sound by Sound

Lugosi’s first years in America were difficult. He barely spoke English, and what stage and film work he found through the 1920s was sporadic. His big break came in 1927 when he was cast in the title role of a stage adaptation of Dracula on Broadway. Because his English was still shaky, he learned much of the part phonetically, sound by sound, without fully understanding every line he was speaking. The play ran for three years, including national tours, and by the time Universal Pictures acquired the film rights, Lugosi had performed the role hundreds of times and had a legitimate claim to it. He wasn’t the studio’s first choice for the 1931 film. Several other actors had been attached and dropped out, but his stage pedigree and his refusal to let go of the part eventually won out. It’s a strange origin story for a man whose performance is now considered one of the most iconic in film history.

Dracula opened on Valentine’s Day, 1931, and it made him a star practically overnight. Lugosi never wore fangs in the role; he didn’t need them. It was the stillness, the accent, the deliberate pacing of lines like his famous refusal of wine that did the work. Women reportedly sent him more fan mail than Clark Gable. He became a U.S. citizen that same year, riding the wave of a success he could not have anticipated a decade earlier as an immigrant with no English and no connections.

The Shadow of His Cape

What I find genuinely tragic about his fame is that the thing that made him immortal is also the thing that ended his career as a working actor with range. Dracula fixed the public’s image of Lugosi so completely that producers stopped seeing him as anything else. His accent, an asset in the role that made him famous, became a liability the moment sound pictures wanted him to play anyone who wasn’t foreign, aristocratic, and vaguely sinister. He spent the 1930s in a run of genuinely good horror films, The Black Cat, The Raven, Son of Frankenstein, usually opposite Boris Karloff, who managed the transition to character actor with far more grace and far better contracts than Lugosi ever did. No matter how hard he tried to escape the shadow of the cape, he kept getting pulled back into it.

By the late 1940s, chronic sciatic pain, likely connected to old war wounds, had him on doctor-prescribed morphine, and the dependency that followed shaped the rest of his life. He later switched to methadone, which he first encountered while touring a Dracula revival in England, then layered in Demerol and barbiturates on top of that just to sleep. His fourth wife, Lillian, tried to help him taper off before their 1953 divorce, and by his own account he’d had some success until the marriage ended and, in his words, it “broke my heart.” In 1955, at seventy-two years old, Lugosi did something almost unheard of for a star of his era: he checked himself into a state hospital and spoke to reporters about his addiction openly, becoming one of the first Hollywood figures to do so on the record. He came out after ninety days declaring himself determined “not to disappoint” the thousands of strangers who had written him letters of support during his stay.

Some biographers, drawing on family interviews, have since argued Lugosi overstated the severity and duration of his addiction, hoping the sympathy would win back his wife and son, or soften producers toward hiring him again. Whatever the exact truth of the timeline, the pain and the dependency were real, and so was the poverty he’d sunk into by then. He told the court he hadn’t a dime left of the roughly half a million dollars he estimated he’d earned in films.

The comeback producers might have granted him never fully arrived. Instead, his final years of work came through his collaboration with Ed Wood, a filmmaker with more enthusiasm than budget, on pictures like Glen or Glenda and Bride of the Monster. It’s easy to read that partnership as exploitation, and there’s truth in that reading, but by most accounts Wood was also one of the only people in the industry still willing to hire Lugosi at all, and something like real affection existed between them. Lugosi died of a heart attack in his Hollywood home on August 16, 1956, before he could finish the film Wood was planning for him next. Footage from that final film would later be repurposed, famously, into Plan 9 from Outer Space.

At his funeral, Lugosi’s family dressed him in a Dracula cape for burial. There’s long-standing disagreement over the details. Whether it was the actual cape from the 1931 film or one of the many others he owned from decades of stage tours, and whether the choice was his own request or his family’s decision on his behalf, is not entirely clear. What isn’t in dispute is the symbolism. A man who spent twenty-five years trying to be seen as something other than Dracula was sent into the ground dressed as the character anyway. I don’t think that’s entirely a sad ending. Lugosi complained about typecasting for most of his career, but he also never stopped performing the role on stage tours, in interviews, in publicity photos, long after Hollywood had moved on to other monsters. Whatever ambivalence he felt about Dracula, he never fully let go of him either. Nearly a century on, neither has anyone else.

Thank you for taking the time to visit us at The Night Visitors Vampire Research Society Vampire Chronicles Publication. If you have any personal experiences with vampires you’d like to share, or if you have any suggestions as to which aspects of vampirism you’d like to see explored in blog posts and YouTube videos, please email us at thenightvisitorsvrs@gmail.com.

You can also connect with fellow Night Visitors from around the world when you join my Facebook group

To watch the Night Visitor’s Vampire Research Society’s true stories, subscribe to the YouTube channel @VampireResearchSociety, or visit my website at thenightvisitors.com

Bela Lugosi: The Man Behind the Cloak was originally published in The Night Visitors Chronicles on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

There is a particular irony in serving garlic heavy dishes at a vampire-themed gathering. It is, after all, the oldest and most stubborn of the folkloric repellents, woven into protective traditions throughout Eastern Europe from Romanian peasant households to Serbian village rituals. Yet here we are with another garlic recipe that is too good to pass up!

I first tasted this dish years ago when my aunt made it for a family gathering, and I found it similar to the vampire chasers recipe I’ve shared previously, albeit a lot less labor intensive and equally delicious. It requires exactly two things: a wheel of brie and an alarming amount of garlic.

It is, in the most literal sense, a vampire deterrent. Whether that’s a feature or a flaw at your Halloween or vampire party is entirely up to you.

Garlic Brie

Serves as many as the wheel allows

Ingredients

1 wheel of brie, any size
1 full head of garlic, or more (peeled, all cloves)
1 generous pinch of coarse salt
Crusty bread, for serving

Instructions

Peel all the garlic cloves and add them to a mortar with a generous pinch of salt. Mash into a rough paste with the pestle. If you don’t have a mortal and pestle, a garlic press will do.

Scrape the waxy rind off the top of the brie to expose the cheese beneath.

Spread the garlic paste evenly over the exposed top of the wheel.

Place in a 350°F oven and bake until the brie is fully melted and bubbling at the edges, approximately 15–20 minutes depending on the size of the wheel.

Serve it immediately, still hot and runny, with the crustiest bread you can find and a glass of red wine in the spirit of a vampire’s preferred drink!

NOTES: Don’t skimp on the garlic. The salt mellows its sharpness as it bakes into the cheese. This is best eaten the moment it comes out of the oven. Any vampires in attendance will simply have to excuse themselves until the brie is eaten, which won’t be long since it’s a huge crown pleaser!

Here is the original recipe for Vampire Chasers if you would like to explore that:

Vampire Chasers: The Recipe that Returned from the Dead

Thank you for taking the time to visit us at The Night Visitors Vampire Research Society Vampire Chronicles Publication. If you have any personal experiences with vampires you’d like to share, or if you have any suggestions as to which aspects of vampirism you’d like to see explored in blog posts and YouTube videos, please email us at thenightvisitorsvrs@gmail.com.

You can also connect with fellow Night Visitors from around the world when you join my Facebook group

To watch the Night Visitor’s Vampire Research Society’s true stories, subscribe to the YouTube channel @VampireResearchSociety, or visit my website at thenightvisitors.com

Baked Brie, an Alarming Amount of Garlic, and No Survivors was originally published in The Night Visitors Chronicles on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Pumpkins are my favorite thing to grow. I’ve loved them since childhood. The whole ritual of Halloween, the smell of the pumpkin as you carve it, roasting the seeds, the amber light of a jack-o’-lantern have always delighted me as nothing else does. So you can imagine how surprised I was to discover that pumpkins have their own place in the lore of the undead, not as a decoration or prop, but as vampires themselves.

Vampire Pumpkins of Kosovo

This folkloric tidbit comes to us from the fieldwork of Serbian ethnologist Tatomir P. Vukanović, who documented oral traditions among Muslim Romani communities in Kosovo-Metohija, Stari Ras, and the Novopazarski Sandžak between 1933 and 1948. Vukanović documented a pervasive belief among the Muslim Romani people of southern Yugoslavia that pumpkins and watermelons could become vampires, and the transformation wasn’t random. It was triggered by timing and specific circumstances.

What makes this tradition so striking is the cultural context in which it lived. These were Muslim Romani communities. Their beliefs were a woven tapestry of Islamic practice, Slavic folk tradition, and traces of older animist ideas carried across centuries of migration. The vampire pumpkin sits at that crossroads of all of these. It isn’t a creature of Christian cosmology. It belongs to a broader Balkan understanding that any object, animate or otherwise, left exposed under certain conditions could absorb and express a kind of undead energy. It is curious to me that people of the Islamic faith would deem pumpkins kept past Christmas at a higher risk of becoming vampires, but this was perhaps an idea borrowed from their Serbian Orthodox neighbors or maybe just a reference to the time of year and not the holiday itself.

How can a Pumpkin Become a Vampire?

In the regions of Podrima and Prizrenski Podgor, the change was said to occur if they were kept for more than ten days after harvest. At that point, the pumpkins would begin to stir, shaking and making a sound, described in the oral accounts as a low, rolling rumble. Sometimes, even a drop of blood would appear on its rind. When this occurred, people knew that the pumpkin had become a vampire.

Regional variations added their own details. In the village of Pirani, the danger came specifically after Christmas. Any pumpkin kept past the holiday was considered at risk. In Lešani, the tradition was more particular: a pumpkin left uncut and undried for three years could become vampiric. However, I don’t know how a pumpkin could stay fresh that long without decomposing; perhaps it was a vampire pumpkin!

What did a vampire pumpkin do?

It’s hard to imagine a pumpkin becoming a vampire without visualizing some things it might do. It turns out that a vampire pumpkin could roll, moving on its own through rooms in homes and through stables, disturbing livestock. Like many vampiric entities, it caused harm in a diffuse and exhausting way by draining energy, disrupting sleep, and weakening the aura of those it moved among. Remarkably, the communities who believed in it were not especially afraid. As Vukanović recorded, people understood that this kind of vampire could not do great damage. It was a mild nuisance more than anything else.

How to dispatch a vampire pumpkin!

Unlike other traditional methods used to destroy vampires, the method of destruction was appropriately domestic. You would simply boil the pumpkin in a pot of water, pour the water away, scrub the remains with a broom, throw the remains out, and burn the broom. It was practical and easy and did not require a stake.

We’ve talked at length in a previous article about garlic, wild roses, hawthorn, rowan, and other plants, where other European communities used plants to work against the vampire. The Kosovo pumpkin is a plant that becomes a vampire. This idea sits alongside a broader Balkan cultural understanding that inanimate objects left out under a full moon could acquire vampiric qualities, not just fruit, but tools, household objects, anything that lingered too long in the wrong conditions.

When Plants and Objects Become Undead

The Kosovo pumpkin tradition is the most specific and well-documented case of a vampiric fruit in the ethnographic record, but the broader idea that plants and vegetables could be caught up in the energy of the undead, or act as a line of defense against it, runs through folklore across a surprising range of cultures.

At first glance, the idea of a vampire pumpkin might appear cute or funny, but there is deeper meaning behind the concept of the undead gourd. What the tradition is really describing is the animism at the heart of many pre-modern farming cultures. Nothing is inert. Everything has energy or a spirit. If you leave an object unattended too long, in the wrong season or at the wrong time, something will change, allowing a wandering spirit to take up residence in it, or its own energy could be activated in some way.

There’s a practical logic beneath the legend.

A pumpkin kept past its prime will bloat, darken, decay, and it might, under certain conditions, emit a sound not entirely unlike a low grumbling as gases move through it. The blood-like droplets that form on its skin can be explained as part of the process of decomposition. Communities that historically faced food scarcity needed good reasons to throw out old fruits and vegetables rather than risk eating them. Vampirism seems like a justifiable excuse.

I think what I love most about the vampire pumpkin tradition is its strangeness and its specificity. It isn’t a vague belief in bad luck. It’s a belief recorded with precise detail by Vukanović, who was there among the Romani people who believed it wholeheartedly and were able to tell him the exact circumstances and timing in which a pumpkin might become a vampire and how to deal with it if it did. The people of Kosovo shared with him something that was very real to them, and what they believed was that sometimes life-sucking pumpkins rolled around their homes and stables at night.

I find that belief beautiful. I grew up loving pumpkins because they remind me of autumn and Halloween, my favorite time of year, but Vukanović and the people of Kosovo gave me another reason to love them.

Have you heard of vampire pumpkins before? Are there any supernatural beliefs or legends surrounding pumpkins or other fruits in your country or culture? Let me know in the comments!

Thank you for taking the time to visit us at The Night Visitors Vampire Research Society Vampire Chronicles Publication. If you have any personal experiences with vampires you’d like to share, or if you have any suggestions as to which aspects of vampirism you’d like to see explored in blog posts and YouTube videos, please email us at thenightvisitorsvrs@gmail.com.

You can also connect with fellow Night Visitors from around the world when you join my Facebook group

To watch the Night Visitor’s Vampire Research Society’s true stories, subscribe to the YouTube channel @VampireResearchSociety, or visit my website at thenightvisitors.com

The Undead Balkan Folklore of Kosovo: Vampire Pumpkins was originally published in The Night Visitors Chronicles on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.