7 Terrifying Monsters That Are (Sort Of) Definitely Real
5. Vampires
Most people have heard of Vlad the Impaler, Bram Stokers inspiration for Dracula. He was essentially a scary Romanian nobleman who had an insatiable passion for sticking people on spikes in the 1400s. Others have heard the stories of Elizabeth Bathory, a 16th Century Hungarian aristocrat who spent her days torturing and murdering people, and her evenings bathing in her victims blood in an alleged attempt to preserve her youth and beauty.
But I hear you; when it comes to being a proper vampire, those two clearly dont Count (pardon the pun). What you want to know is whether there are people who actually bite necks, fear the sun, hypnotise fair maidens and chill out with bats.
Rabies is about as close as it gets but it gets pretty close. A 1998 paper by neurologist Dr Juan GómezAlonso managed to link numerous aspects of the vampire legend to sufferers of rabies. For a start, one sure fire way to catch the condition is to have a run in with an infected bat or wolf. Immediately theres a somewhat vampiric link there. Once the disease sets in, it begins to affect your brain in various ways, sometimes causing you to seek lots of sexual activity or simply driving you completely feral and decidedly bitey. Rabies can also make you hypersensitive to a number of stimuli including direct sunlight and strong odours like that of garlic, meaning youre probably going to be coming out at night and avoiding escargots at all costs.
When you look at it from the right perspective, rabies is a lot like vampirisim in all manner of ways and may well have inspired the very first legends. You dont have to have fallen under some sort of curse to want to come out after dark, hypnotically woo terrified damsels and bite people on the neck, and I daresay youd still die if someone drove a stake through your heart. I guess the only perk while it lasts is having that Robert Pattinson sort of allure.