Vampirism: causes and real cases of this rare paraphilia

Vampirism or hematodipsia is one of the most twisted paraphilias: those who suffer from it feel an urgent need to ingest, perform treatments or rituals with blood (usually human), motivated on many occasions by the belief that this liquid contains magical rejuvenating or life-prolonging properties.

What is vampirism? Causes and symptoms

A first possible explanation for this disorder lies in the possibility that those who ingest blood do so out of pure fetishism: in her they find the sexual pleasure necessary to carry out their most Machiavellian fantasies in which the red liquid is the protagonist.

Another of the commonly exposed causes is some type of traumatic experience during childhood that as adults are linked to sexual stimulation. Psychologists agree that it is a mental disorder linked to sadism, which pushes those affected to hurt and attack others to achieve a specific purpose. Some experts have even drawn a parallel between vampirism and necrophilia.

Of course, it is possible to get rid of the collective ideology that literary works and vampire movies have left us. Those affected by hematodipsia do not use the blood they take from their victims "to survive" or anything like that.

It is a disorder more linked to the satisfaction of a pleasure resulting from the suffering of others.

Be that as it may, the causes of vampirism are under discussion, especially for the few cases historically described.

Brief historical overview of cases of hematodipsia

Several cases have marked the collective unconscious around this disease. Although many of these stories are real, cinema and literature have led us to understand this phenomenon in a biased way. Anyway, These cases that we will report below refer to flesh and blood people who suffered from vampirism.

The Impaler

The cult of blood and its supposed qualities has its roots in history and has made famous people such as Vlad Tepes "the Impaler" (XV century).

This prince of Romania was nicknamed him for using impalement as punishment for both traitors and those who fell in battle. of her enemy armies; and then drink her blood, convinced that he can thus achieve invincibility. This figure inspired the Irish Bram Stoker his famous eternal love story "Dracula" (1897), as well as multiple later literary and film adaptations.

The Bloody Countess

We move to the late Middle Ages, at the end of the 16th century and the beginning of the 17th. In Hungary, Erzsébet Báthory, also known as the "Bloody Countess", would go down in history for her devotion to the red liquid and for what she was able under the pretext of always remaining beautiful.

When she reached adolescence, this noble-born woman became obsessed with the idea of ​​wanting to preserve her beauty forever. Therefore, she contacted witches and sorceresses to see how she could make her wish come true. They started her in ceremonies in which she had to drink blood, preferably drawn from young girls and "virgins of soul", that is, who had not known love. Over time, her descent into hell was increasing, since, not content with murder to drink human blood, She began to bathe in it: she spent hours in liters of this liquid, believing that this would keep her looking young from her to forever.

After years of disappearances of the local women who lived in the surrounding towns, the countess and her accomplices were discovered. To the sorceresses and witches who had helped her commit the crimes and who performed the ceremonies bloody men cut off their fingers with a red-hot iron, then decapitated them and threw their bodies at a bonfire. The countess was sentenced to be sandwiched while still alive in a cabin that had a small skylight at the top through which the sunlight filtered through.

Despite the horribleness of the penance imposed and being fed once a day, the countess herself endured four years in a sandwich and never showed any signs of regret for what she did. Did the eating and her blood baths have anything to do with delaying her agony for so long? Or, on the contrary, Would she have died a victim of some disease (such as pneumonia) if she had not undergone such processes?

The vampire of Barcelona

During the early twentieth century, Barcelona, ​​a city today known worldwide for being one of the main tourist claims worldwide, she witnessed one of the most terrible events that permeates the black chronicle Spanish. The disappearance of several children in the district known as “El Raval” put the people who lived in this impoverished neighborhood on alert.

The culprit was Enriqueta Martiher, that she would earn the nickname "La vampira de Barcelona" or "La vampira del Raval", a woman with a hermit life and dark customs: they say that she she dedicated herself to kidnapping children from humble families or those who had been abandoned on the street to murder them, extracting their blood and fat in order to She use them as a base for cosmetic products, ointments and potions that she later sold to personalities of the high spheres with whom she was elbowed.

This woman had her home on the ground floor of a well-known street in Barcelona and it was thanks to the good eye of a neighbor that she was able to put an end to her reign of terror. After kidnapping on February 10, 1912, a girl of barely five years old; On the 27th of the same month, a neighbor who lived in front of the lair of ‘the vampire’ was able to see through one of the windows someone young and with a shaved head. At first he did not think that he could be related to the disappearance of her little girl, but he was surprised to see her there, since Enriqueta had lived alone in that place for more than a year. After discussing it with some of the shopkeepers and merchants, they decided to alert the police, who finally obtained a reliable clue about the mysterious case.

When the agents appeared at the scene, they did not find any alarming sign that suggested that that woman dressed in ragged rags was the cause of so much confusion... Until they found a room that the owner kept suspiciously under lock and key: there were several witchcraft books, bloody clothes of boys and girls, large amounts of human fat stored in glass jars, a large skinner knife, and the bones of at least twelve boys and girls stored in a large coat.

As she confessed at the police station, her way of proceeding was as follows: dressed in tattered rags as if she were a beggar woman, she stalked her victims and kidnapped them in the middle of the street. Once in her lair, she murdered them, drained her blood and sebum from her. Later, at night, dressed in her best clothes, she went to the central areas of the city where the wealthy people were concentrated and there she contacted them to trade in their products, which were said to have both rejuvenating and healing properties for some diseases typical of the time (for example, tuberculosis). He also admitted that there was a time when he had no luck in his abductions as children, so he chose to extract fat from stray animals like cats and dogs.

Following her statement, she was sent to a women's prison, where she would attempt to take her life twice, one of them trying to bite the veins out of her wrist. From that moment, she was under the surveillance of three of the most dangerous and respected inmates in the center, to prevent other female colleagues from injuring her or from doing it to herself again.

It is believed that her suicide attempt was to avoid giving in to pressure from the authorities for her to confess the names of the personalities for whom she worked, since it was always suspected that important families of the epoch. Perhaps that explains the causes of her death, in 1913, when despite the supervision to which she was subjected, a group of inmates lynched her to the end of her life. The most suspicious have always considered the possibility that someone, from outside or inside prison, commissioned their immediate execution. Unfortunately, the case was in the investigation phase, so she was never tried and the full truth could not be known.

The bogeyman

Who hasn't heard of "The Bogeyman"? In Spanish folklore, in the past there was talk of this character who, according to what they say, wandered through the towns in search of those children who did not behave well, whom she put in the big sack that she carried with her and were never seen again. watch.

Although you might think that it is a simple invention that arose to terrorize the little ones and make them obey, the truth is that this legend It has its origin in the so-called "sacamantecas" or "sacauntos" that, at the beginning of the 20th century, murdered several children in different areas of the geography Spanish. At a time when hunger was hitting rural areas severely, many saw an opportunity to make money easily murdering and extracting the ointments of young children, then selling them to wealthy people in the form of poultices or ointments.

Juan Díaz de Garayo, in Vitoria; o José González Tovar, in Malaga, are some examples that occupy positions of doubtful honor in the dark history of Spain and that, without a doubt, we will be in charge of addressing in future publications.