Tiny vampires

May 26, 2016 by Julie Cohen

Vampires are real, and they've been around for millions of years. At least, the amoebae variety has. So suggests new research from UC Santa Barbara paleobiologist Susannah Porter.

Using a scanning electron microscope to examine minute fossils, Porter found perfectly circular drill holes that may have been formed by an ancient relation of Vampyrellidae amoebae. These single-celled creatures perforate the walls of their prey and reach inside to consume its cell contents. Porter's findings appear in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

"To my knowledge these holes are the earliest direct evidence of predation on eukaryotes," said Porter, an associate professor in UCSB's Department of Earth Science. Eukaryotes are organisms whose cells contain a nucleus and other organelles such as mitochondria.

"We have a great record of predation on animals going back 550 million years," she continued, "starting with the very first mineralized shells, which show evidence of drillholes. We had nothing like that for early life—for the time before animals appear. These holes potentially provide a way of looking at predator-prey interactions in very deep time in ancient microbial ecosystems."

Porter examined fossils from the Chuar Group in the Grand Canyon—once an ancient seabed—that are between 782 and 742 million years old. The holes are about one micrometer (one thousandth of a millimeter) in diameter and occur in seven of the species she identified. The holes are not common in any single one species; in fact, they appear in not more than 10 percent of the specimens.

"I also found evidence of specificity in hole sizes, so different species show different characteristic hole sizes, which is consistent with what we know about modern vampire amoebae and their food preferences," Porter said. "Different species of amoebae make differently sized holes. The Vampyrellid amoebae make a great modern analog, but because vampirelike feeding behavior is known in a number of different unrelated amoebae, it makes it difficult to pin down exactly who the predator was."

Read more at: 

What is the meaning of the 'vampire graves' unearthed in Poland?

The world's media have been getting their teeth into the story of a "vampire grave" uncovered last week by archaeologists at a roadside construction site in the town of Gliwice in southern Poland. When four skeletons were found with their skulls placed between their legs, speculation followed that these were suspected vampires that had been prevented from rising from the grave through the once-ritualistic local practice of decapitation.

"It's very difficult to tell when these burials were carried out," Dr Jacek Pierzak, the lead archaeologist, told the Dziennik Zachodni newspaper. Early indications, he said, suggested the grave could be dated to the 16th century. Other clues possibly suggesting a vampire burial included the skeleton's lack of any personal items, such as jewellery. Meanwhile,other local newspaper reports noted that an alternative theory suggested they were not vampires, but victims of an execution at a known nearby gallows.

Whatever the truth – the Guardian adopts a firmly sceptical position on the undead – the discovery of so-called vampire graves is not uncommon across eastern Europe. Last year, archaeologists in Bulgaria found two medieval skeletons with iron rods driven through their chest. According to Bozhidar Dimitrov, who runs the National History Museum in Sofia, about 100 such skeletons have been uncovered in Bulgaria, with the gruesome practice known across the Balkans, where fear of vampires has been at its strongest over the centuries.

Read on

'Put garlic in your windows and crosses in your homes': Serbian council warns residents vampire is on the loose after his 'house' collapses

Sava Savanovic 'on prowl' after his watermill home in Serbia collapsed

Legend has it he drank blood of anyone who came to mill their grain

Mayor: 'We've also reminded people to put Holy crosses in their houses'

Fear factor: Panic has spread through a Serbian village amid rumours that notorious vampire Sava Savanovic is on the loose

Sales of garlic are booming in western Serbia today after the local council issued a public health warning that a vampire was on the loose.

The official announcement came after an old ruined mill said to once have been the home of the country's most famous vampire collapsed.

Sava Savanovic was believed to have lived in the shack on the Rogacica river in Zarozje village in the municipality of Bajina Basta. 

It is said he drank the blood of anybody that came to mill their grain.

The watermill was bought by the local Jagodic family and they were too scared to use it as a mill – but discovered it was a goldmine when they started advertising for tourists to come and visit it – always during the day.

The family were worried about carrying out building work on the mill because they were scared they might disturb the vampire or unleash his wrath.

And now the property has collapsed through lack of repair.

But for locals it has sparked rumours that the vampire is now free once again.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2239072/Vampire-Sava-Savanovic-loose-Serbian-local-council-issues-public-health-warning.html#ixzz2DuErGYTI

Urals man killed wife ‘believing she was a vampire’

A man from Kudymkar in Perm region axed his wife to death while believing that she was a vampire, according to police.

Ivan Chetin, aged 53, had been on a drinking spree "when he took an axe and started to chop everything around him". 

'He severed her hands, legs and head and also chopped off her breasts,' say local reports.

'It seemed to him that he was surrounded by vampires,' disclosed a source at the Kudymkar branch of the Investigative Committee of Russia.

'The man grabbed an axe and began to fight them. As a result, he struck his wife, then chopped her body and put the bleeding pieces to the bath.'

Having sobered up the man realised what he had done and confessed to his niece. She called the police who detained the 'axeman'. 

Chetin is awaiting trial and faced the prospect of up to 15 years in jail if found guilty of murdering his wife. 

His 54 year old spouse - who was not named -  was 'kind and loved Ivan', said a neighbour.

'She always kept their house tidy, and was very friendly'.

http://siberiantimes.com/weird-and-wonderful/news-and-features/news/urals-man-killed-wife-believing-she-was-a-vampire/

The Great New England Vampire Panic

Children playing near a hillside gravel mine found the first graves. One ran home to tell his mother, who was skeptical at first—until the boy produced a skull.

Because this was Griswold, Connecticut, in 1990, police initially thought the burials might be the work of a local serial killer named Michael Ross, and they taped off the area as a crime scene. But the brown, decaying bones turned out to be more than a century old. The Connecticut state archaeologist, Nick Bellantoni, soon determined that the hillside contained a colonial-era farm cemetery. New England is full of such unmarked family plots, and the 29 burials were typical of the 1700s and early 1800s: The dead, many of them children, were laid to rest in thrifty Yankee style, in simple wood coffins, without jewelry or even much clothing, their arms resting by their sides or crossed over their chests.

Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/The-Great-New-England-Vampire-Panic-169791986.html#ixzz283c254vo

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/Meet-the-Real-Life-Vampires-of-New-England-and-Abroad-170342886.html#ixzz27yTMTIvm

'Vampire' Plague Victim: Remains Found In 16th Century Venice Grave Spur Scientific Debate

By: Charles Q. Choi, LiveScience Contributor 
Published: 05/30/2012 10:07 AM EDT on LiveScience

What may have been an exorcism of a vampire in Venice is now drawing bad blood among scientists arguing over whether gravediggers were attempting to defeat an undead monster.

The controversy begins with a mass grave of 16th-century plague victims on the Venetian island of Nuovo Lazzaretto. The remains of a woman there apparently had a brick shoved in her mouth, perhaps to exorcise the corpse in what may have been the first vampire burial known in archaeology, said forensic anthropologist Matteo Borrini of the University of Florence in Italy.

Vampire superstitions were common when plague devastated Europe, and much, if not all, of this folklore could be due to misconceptions about the natural stages of decomposition, Borrini said. The recently dead can often appear unnervingly alive. As the corpse's skin shrinks and pulls back, for example, hair and nails may appear to grow after death.

The remains of the woman were apparently wrapped in a shroud, based on the position of her collarbone, Borrini suggested. A corpse might appear to have chewed through its shroud because of corrosive fluids it spewed as it decayed, perhaps frightening gravediggers into thinking it was a vampire. 

Vampire myths link the monsters with contagions, and the plague ran rampant in Venice in 1576, killing as many as 50,000 people, nearly a third of the city, including famed Renaissance artist Titian. The gravediggers that ran across this corpse may have wanted to prevent a vampire from ravaging the city further with pestilence, Borrini and his colleague Emilio Nuzzolese suggested in the Journal of Forensic Sciences in 2010. The "vampire" has since been discussed on Italian national TV and a National Geographic documentary.

Continued:  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/30/vampire-plague-victim-venice_n_1556091.html?ref=fb&src=sp&comm_ref=false

'Vampire' stalks Siberian livestock

A blood-sucking creature is preying upon goats near Novosibirsk. As rational explanations run thin on the ground, the specter of the so-called chupacabra raises its demon head.


Horrified farmers and smallholders are confronted by the drained corpses of their livestock in the morning, bloodless and bearing puncture marks to the neck but otherwise largely in tact.

But local cops are reluctant to record apparent vampire attacks, as they await official recertification, leaving the locals up in arms.

Blood-suckers
“If this creature is not stopped it could make its way to Novosibirsk! Only our police force are doing jack-diddly about it,” complaining locals told Komsomolskaya Pravda. “They say that there is no Chupacabra. Come if you will journalists, have a look at what is happening to us.”

Death in the night
Local animal keeper Natalya told of her experiences.

“It all happened on the night of June 10,” she told KP. “I was sleeping, my daughter was sitting at the computer looking at the internet. She says that about 2.00 am she heard a sound in the yard. Some whining.

“The dog which guards the farm screamed for 15 minutes and then quietened down. The dog’s behavior drew the attention of my daughter Natalie, but she didn’t think it was important. She thought that if a stranger had come to the house then the dog would bark. And here it was more like whining, you think of howling at the moon.

“In the morning it became clear why the dog had been howling. I got up and went to the barn to milk the goats. I looked and saw right on the doorstep a goat with its neck thrown back unnaturally. On the neck there was something like a bite mark, the belly was torn, and there were huge claw marks. I came over bad and started screaming, I ran to the house to see the children were alright,” she said.

Whatever killed the goats never tried to eat the flesh, it just drank its victim’s blood.

From the devil
Natalya’s news of a near-mythical chupacabra spread like wildfire among residents of Krasnoginnoe village, then it became clear that nearby Tolmachevskoye and Chick villages had also been afflicted.

The blood-suckers had targeted cattle in Tolmochevskoye. “It’s come from the devil. I’ve seen it. My brother, even when he lived near St Petersburg seven years ago accidently photographed a chupacabra. He took the usual family picture and then saw the demonic face through the kitchen window. Grey-red it was, such an unpleasant face, like a bat with fangs,” Natalie’s uncle Viktor Shushpanov told KP.

“My brother showed me this photograph and upon the advice of his family he burned it,” he said.

Ring the church bells
“All the people are scared, they fear that the creature will move onto children,” the head of the village said. “We have organized night patrols of six people. We walk through the village, on the look out for this wickedness. But so far we have had no results.”

While hopes for speedy retribution are fast diminishing the beast has turned out to be a boon to troubled parents, presenting a very useful threat for naughty children.

The chupacabra is a recent legend, originating from mid 1990s North America. It is supposedly a heavy creature, the size of a small bear, with a row of spines reaching from the neck to the base of the tail.

But there seems to be a more prosaic explanation: Discovery News reported in 2010 that what were believed to be chupacabra in the Americas turned out to be wild dogs infected with a deadly form of mange. The University of Michigan put forward a similar theory.

http://themoscownews.com/russia/20110726/188875163.html

Before Hollywood went vampire crazy, Scots kids hunted them in graveyard

HUNDREDS of children were marauding between the tombstones and the city was gripped with terror. A vampire had been spotted in the cemetery.


Some of the brave monster-hunters were armed with makeshift weapons and dogs.

Most, though, were armed with nothing more sinister than a fertile imagination, fuelled by the magic of cinema and the wonder of American comics.

This might sound like a scene from Twilight or one of the other vampire films that have been sweeping the box office, but it's actually a Gorbals policeman recalling a night in Glasgow's southern Necropolis 47 years ago.

Teams of hysterical schoolchildren had staked out the graveyard and crypts in the hunt for a truly terrifying figment of collective hysteria.

There was a ghoul in the Gorbals. It had iron teeth. It had taken two boys.

And they were out to get it. Schoolboy Tam Smith was eating ice cream in a cafe with his aunt half a mile from the scene of the hysteria and horror when he first heard tales of fearsome fangs around the corner.

As he set out on his adventure to help slay the beast - or at least catch a glimpse of it - he felt no fear.

"I had my auntie Sadie with me," he recalled, laughing. "I was only seven but she was a right bully, I tell you. The boys were right feart of her.

"We had been sitting in the Station Cafe, next to the Bridge Street underground, after school with some of my pals.

"We were sitting there listening to the jukebox and a friend of hers ran in and told us there was a vampire in the graveyard."

Fired by childhood excitement and with his aunt Sadie safely to hand, Tam and his mates headed back into the graveyard, resting place to a quarter of a million souls.

He said: "The walls were lined with people.

We ventured through the gatehouse and there were loads of kids in there, some wandering around, some sitting on the walls.

"There were a lot of dogs too, and mums and dads with kids.

"We found a place to stand out of the way because there were so many people there.

"I think the whole of the Gorbals was in that graveyard. It's hard to put an estimate on the number of people."

Tam didn't see anything to substantiate claims of a bloodthirsty beast with a galvanised gub. But even now, almost half a century later, the spooky images and intoxicating excitement are vividly recalled.

"I can't remember how long we stayed," he said. "But one thing I remember clearly is that there was a furnace blast from the ironworks at Dixon Blazes when it started to get dark.

"It turned the sky flaming red right across the top end of the Gorbals and when that went up, everyone jumped.

"They thought that was the vampire, or the so-called Iron Man of the Gorbals.

"At one point, someone had been burning stuff in a nearby chapel lane and one of the stories was that the vampire had burned one of the boys there. Those were the kind of stories that were going around at the time.

"You would go to bed at night and wonder if these things were actually happening."

It seems unaimaginable now in the Grand Theft Auto days of heightened violence and teen fascination with vamp-sex TV dramas like True Blood, but this imaginary Gorbals bogeyman welded a power more fierce than any modern day character from computer games or books.

That night in Glasgow, this fictional beast unleashed a bolt of mass hysteria, similar, if on a smaller and less tragic scale, to the radio broadcast of HG Wells' War of The Worlds.

Tam said: "It was atmospheric, looking back it was great. Back then we had no TVs, we went to picture halls and cafes for entertainment, so it was amazing to have something like this happening on your doorstep.

"My great grandad stayed next to the graveyard, he looked out right on to it.

"The stories he would speak of were of the Iron Man, but other people were talking about The Man With The Iron Teeth, which might have been because of the iron works behind it.

"I remember the head mistress of Gorbals Public School telling us all in the dining room that we were to keep away from the graveyard.
"But of course, boys will be boys and we still climbed up there and looked around for this iron man or vampire. It was an adventure for us. For ages afterwards, people would come in to school and claim they'd seen it last night."

Naturally, this being Glasgow, even a fanged fiend was due a winch from time to time, and the local boys wasted no time concocting an iron lady for him ... long before the more terrifying real one made it to Downing Street.

Tam said: "There was an old lady who used to carry two cats in a basket. She would go to the graveyard to get peace away from the kids and let her cats have a wander.

"But she was in there the night we went looking for it and people were involving the 'cat woman' with the iron man. It was a shame when you think about it, she was an eccentric with wiry hair, but we called her Tin Lizzie. She was the iron man's 'burd'.

"It's a shame. The cat woman was ridiculed by kids, when you're young like that you don't think how that might hurt someone."

In those days, Glasgow was a city packed with picture halls, a fair proportion of which were in the Gorbals area.

In an echo of that need for entertainment, Radio 4 will this week broadcast a documentary about the mythical monster of the city's southside and how its terror spread as far as the House of Commons.

Presented by novelist Louise Welsh, The Gorbals Vampire explores how the myth of the child-killing bloodsucker led politicians to introduce the Children and Young Persons (Harmful Publications) Act 1955.

It was a response to the claim that an influx of American horror comics with names like Astounding Stories and Tales From The Crypt had made an impact on young minds in the west of Scotland.

Combined with the ready acceptance of apocryphal monsters sprung from the local iron works, the comics were seen by many as the reason for the sudden hysteria.

Academics have since pointed out, however, that none of the comics featured a vampire with iron teeth, leaving some looking to the Bible (Daniel 7:7 - featuring a monster with metal dentistry) and even a poem about a local bogeyman taught in surrounding schools.

Tam reckons the reason for the national interest in the story was fed by the reputation the Gorbals had across the UK.

He said: "The area had a reputation partly because of that No Mean City book. It gave the Gorbals a really bad name.

"We used to swap comics in each other's close stairways. I had Superman and Batman comics. But as a kid, you tend to believe these things were possible.

"There were 90,000 people who stayed in that area. I have often said that if there really was a ghost or a vampire in that area you would never know because there were too many people."

Brother of Daily Record psychic barber Gordon Smith, artist Tam is heavily involved in archiving the area, and his sculptures of the local pubs are popular.

He tells of another creepy experience after the iron-toothed vampire had moved on to his next city, involving the discovery of human bones on the Clydeside.

Tam said: "They were digging the foundations for a garage and came across skeletons. We all dashed along to see, and the police had bones laid out on big canopies. It turned out to be the skeletons of the leper colony (the 'bell' of which gave rise to the area being dubbed Gorbals after the 'gory bell') in the 12th Century."

All this talk of bodies and bones and blood lust in the city is enough to give a grown man nightmares... bullying auntie by your side or not.

The Gorbals Vampire Tuesday BBC Radio 4, (103-105FM) 11pm. It will be repeated on Radio Scotland in early April.

Paul English