'From 12th-century 'revenants' to today's teen thriller Twilight, belief in vampires has been an enduring theme in cultural history,' and in the September issue of the BBC History magazine, Richard Sugg writes about a few incidents of vampire history. Sugg is a lecturer in the English department at Durham University, has written Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires: The History of Corpse Medicine from the Renaissance to the Victorians and the forthcoming The Smoke of the Soul: Medicine, Physiology and Religion in Early Modern England, and is currently preparing Faces of the Vampire: From Holy Terror to Vampotainment. Elsewhere, it has been pointed out that one of the 'vampire cases' that Sugg reports, probably is simply 'a sensationalist cock-and-bull story'. Sugg, apparently, supports the theory that vampire beliefs are based on experiences of sleep paralysis:
'In her recent book on sleep paralysis, Shelley Adler related how the religious beliefs of Hmong people from south-east Asia led to several nightmare-related deaths during and after the 1970s. Therese attack, which occurred in the USA among Hmong refugees, were thought to be due to angry ancestral spirits and subsequently inspired the horror film A Nightmare on Elm Street.
So vampires (or nightmares incorporating them) really can kill you - if you believe in them. Anyone who has suffered from sleep paralysis nightmares will understand this level of terror. And if you suffered such an attack in a little Serbian or Greek village a century or more ago, what explanation could there be - except something supernatural and demonic?'
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