Big book of mythology

Vampires

This one was requested by @RJ_is_life I hope that you like it :).

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Vampires

Origin:Transylvanian and Serbian mythology

Summary and or Explanation: (First of all let's make one thing known the Strigoi is considered to be the Grandfather of vampires, or if you look at it from a virus prospective patient zero.)

A vampire is a being from folklore who subsists by feeding on the life essence (generally in the form of blood) of living creatures.Undead beings, vampires often visited loved ones and caused mischief or deaths in the neighbourhoods they inhabited when they were alive. They wore shrouds and were often described as bloated and of ruddy or dark countenance, markedly different from today's gaunt, pale vampire which dates from the early 19th century. (Oh yeah extremely different for one thing, they went from looking like monsters to looking like diamonds.)

Although vampiric entities have been recorded in most cultures, the term vampire was not popularized in the west until the early 18th century, after an influx of vampire superstition into Western Europe from areas where vampire legends were frequent, such as the Balkans and Eastern Europe, although local variants were also known by different names, such as shtriga in Albania, vrykolakas in Greece and strigoi in Romania. This increased level of vampire superstition in Europe led to what can only be called mass hysteria and in some cases resulted in corpses actually being staked and people being accused of vampirism. (Of course it did! What did you expect, especially in a time when people were highly religious. I'm just surprised they mostly stuck to staking corpses and didn't go after their neighbors at the first sign of anemia. Oh wait...)

In modern times, however, the vampire is generally held to be a fictitious entity, although belief in similar vampiric creatures such as the chupacabra (The chupacabra is a hispanic-werewolf-goat killing-demon-thing that people mistake for a coyote with mange!) still persists in some cultures. Early folk belief in vampires has sometimes been ascribed to the ignorance of the body's process of decomposition after death and how people in pre-industrial societies tried to rationalise this, creating the figure of the vampire to explain the mysteries of death. Porphyria was also linked with legends of vampirism in 1985 and received much media exposure, but has since been largely discredited.

The charismatic and sophisticated vampire of modern fiction was born in 1819 with the publication of The Vampyre by John Polidori; the story was highly successful and arguably the most influential vampire work of the early 19th century. However, it is Bram Stoker's 1897 novel Dracula which is remembered as the quintessential vampire novel and provided the basis of the modern vampire legend. The success of this book spawned a distinctive vampire genre, still popular in the 21st century, with books, films, and television shows. The vampire has since become a dominant figure in the horror genre. (I have yet to see scary vampires in years, the last terrifying vampires I were on True blood and there was lots of death and other things...heheheheh.)

The Oxford English Dictionary dates the first appearance of the English word vampire (as vampyre) in English from 1734, in a travelogue titled Travels of Three English Gentlemen published in The Harleian Miscellany in 1745. Vampires had already been discussed in French and German literature.

After Austria gained control of northern Serbia and Oltenia with the Treaty of Passarowitz in 1718, officials noted the local practice of exhuming bodies and "killing vampires".