Vampires
Article by Bindi Lavelle

Okay, for those of you not caught up, (or should I say Brain-washed?) with the whole Twilight phenomenon, we are going to feature in the coming weeks, Vampire in all the various guises.
The obvious place to start is Europe, because much of our pop-culture understanding of Vampires stem from this continent. To be more specific, the Vampire we usually see is from Bram Stoker's Dracula.
Dracula, is loosely based on Romanian King, Vlad “The Impaler” Tepes, whose fearsome and bloody displays served to keep enemies of his kingdom at bay.
While the term Nosferatu (meaning undead) also comes from this area, that is not say that blood-sucker stories are limited to this section of Europe.
There is the Greek Lamia. The daughter of Poseidon and a mortal Queen, Lamia was punished by Hera for having an affair with Zeus. The punishment? Hera killed Lamia's children. Outraged, Lamia took revenge by devouring mortal children. This practice left Lamia deformed, becoming more serpentine with each child she ate.
Germany has a similar tale, that of The White Lady: the wife of a noble who after being shunned by her (now bored) husband dies in childbirth en route to her father's mill. So the woman returns from the dead to drink the blood of infants.
In Russia there is Pijavka (which means leech), a shape-shifter (though it is important to note that most forms have green hair). Pijavka attacks with a mouth full of teeth, folks who let the disguised Pijavka into their home.
Throughout Europe exist many other tales of blood-suckers. The middle ages and the rise of Christianity served to proliferate these stories as fables of good and evil, but as we will see next week, folktales of this nature exist across many cultures.