Sink your teeth in..
★ NOW here’s something to sink your teeth into!
As we revealed yesterday, boffin Dr Brian Sharpless claims real-life Draculas, who neck blood for sexual kicks due to Renfield’s syndrome, are walking (not undead) among us. ★ Here KIM CARR has 15 bloody great vampire facts...
1 Babylonian and Sumerian mythology is said to be the source of the oldest known tales of vampires where they were called ekimmu and were thought to be evil spirits who came back to suck the life out of the living after not being buried sufficiently.
2 In the 18th century, laws were passed after bodies were regularly dug up to make sure they were properly dead to avoid vampire attacks.
3 Suspected female vampires were buried with a rock in their mouth to stop them being able to come back and feed.
4 They’re said to hate sunlight and can be killed by exposure to rays as well as a stake through the heart, fire, beheading and boiling in vinegar.
5 Another method to get rid of vampires is garlic. Brides used to carry a bulb under their wedding dresses and sailors took some on board to prevent vampire attacks.
6 Prehistoric stone monuments called dolmens were thought to have been put over graves in north-west Europe to stop vampires from rising.
7 Bavarian vampires are said to sleep with their left eye open.
8 Evil 15th-century ruler Vlad The Impaler, who skinned people alive and ate bread dipped in the blood of his enemies, was considered to have been a vampire as his tomb was found empty after he was murdered in 1476. King Charles is distantly related to him.
9 The Hungarian Countess Elizabeth Bathory, who was born in 1560, was accused of being a vampire after biting young girls while torturing them and then taking a bath in their blood.
10 Egyptian goddess Sekhmet was said to have enjoyed drinking blood.
11 Chinese vampire legend tells of beasts called chi’iang shih (corpse-hopper) who could change into a wolf with red eyes and crooked claws that they used to attack women.
12 Other folklore tells of how a person could turn into a vampire simply by having teeth when they were born, having a cat jump on their corpse when being buried, being a seventh son or being a nun who stepped over an unburied body.
13 In literature the most famous vampire is Count Dracula, a Transylvanian who turned others into vampires by biting them in author Bram Stoker’s works.
14 The first fictional account of a vampire was John Polidori’s The Vampyre, which was mistakenly published under Lord Byron’s name. Polidori was his doctor and said to have based his vamp on the poet.
15 The first vampire movie is thought to have been The Secret Of House No 5 in 1912. Aidan Turner played a vampire on the TV show Being Human.