[angel011]

Well, Shi'ark, here's a little something about vampires, if you like. In Serbia (that's where I live, and that's where the vampire myth originated) it was believed that vampires were red in the face (from all the blood they've taken), not pale. They didn't transform anyone into a vampire, they just killed people by draining them. If someone was a bad man during his life, he would, after he died, rise as a vampire; or, if an animal stepped over the body of a recently deceased, the person could come back as a vampire, so the bodies were guarder until the funeral.

Vampires would also, sometimes, go back to their wives, especially if the wife was young and pretty. Sometimes there were children from such unions, and those children were especially skilled at killing vampires. Vampires were killed by staking with an iron stick through the stomach (the stomach was usually swolen with all the stolen blood). You had to be carefull, though, since a little butterfly was likely to escape from the vampire's mouth -- that was the vampire's soul, and it had to be destroyed too.

Up until two hundred years or so, in the more rural parts of Serbia, people were still digging up corpses and staking them, if, say, children were weakening and dying in the area and no one knew the reason for it (the reason, most likely, was that there was not enough food for the children).