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 (generally human), often motivated by the belief that this liquid contains magical rejuvenating or life-extending properties.
A first possible explanation for this disorder lies in the possibility that those who ingest blood do so out of pure fetishism: In it 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 they link 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 goal. Some experts have even drawn a parallel between vampirism and necrophilia.
Of course, it is worth getting rid of the collective ideology that literary works and vampire movies have left us. Those affected by hematodipsia do not use the blood they extract from their victims “to survive” or anything similar. 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 due to the few cases described historically.
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 relate below refer to people of flesh and blood who suffered vampirism.
The Impaler
The cult of blood and its supposed qualities has its roots in history and has given fame to famous people such as Vlad Tepes “the Impaler” (15th century).
This prince of Romania received his nickname for using impalement as punishment for both traitors and those who died in battle of the enemy armies; and then drink his blood, convinced that he could thus achieve invincibility. This figure inspired the Irishman Bram Stoker in his famous story of eternal love “Dracula” (1897), as well as multiple subsequent literary and film adaptations.
We move to the Late Middle Ages, at the end of the 16th century and the beginning of the 17th century. 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 to do under the pretext of always remaining beautiful.
When she reached adolescence, this woman of noble birth began to become obsessed with the idea of wanting to preserve her beauty forever. Therefore, she contacted witches and witches to see how she could make her wish come true. They initiated her into ceremonies in which she had to drink blood, preferably taken from young girls and “virgins of soul,” that is, those who had not known her love. Over time, her descent into hell increased, since, not content with murdering to drink human blood, she began to bathe in it: she spent hours immersed in liters of this liquid, believing that in this way she would maintain her young appearance forever.
After years of disappearances of local women who lived in the surrounding towns, the countess and her accomplices were discovered. The witches and witches who had helped her commit the crimes and who performed the bloody ceremonies had their fingers cut off with a red-hot iron, then their heads were beheaded and their bodies thrown into a bonfire. The countess was sentenced to be walled up while alive in a room that had a small skylight at the top through which sunlight filtered.
Despite the horrible nature of the penance imposed and being fed once a day, the countess endured four years walled up and never showed signs of repentance for what she did. Did the ingestion and blood baths have anything to do with postponing her agony for so long? Or, on the contrary, Would you have died from a disease (such as pneumonia) if you had not undergone such processes?
The vampire of Barcelona
During the beginning of the 20th century, Barcelona, a city today known worldwide for being one of the main tourist attractions worldwide, witnessed one of the most terrible events that permeate the Spanish black chronicle. 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 Martí, who would earn the nickname “The Vampire of Barcelona” or “The Vampire of Raval”, a woman with a hermit’s life and dark customs: it is said that she dedicated herself to kidnapping children from humble families or those who had been abandoned on the street to be murdered, their blood and fats extracted in order to use them as a base for cosmetic products, ointments and potions that he later sold to personalities in the high spheres with whom he rubbed shoulders.
This woman lived on the ground floor of a well-known street in Barcelona and it was thanks to the good eye of a neighbor that her reign of terror was able to end. After kidnapping a girl of just five years old on February 10, 1912; On the 27th of the same month, a neighbor who lived in front of ‘the vampire’s’ lair was able to see someone young and with a shaved head through one of the windows. At first she did not think that she could be related to the disappearance of her little girl, but she was surprised to see her there, because Enriqueta had been living 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 arrived at the scene, they did not find any alarming signs that indicated that the woman dressed in tattered rags was the cause of so much confusion… Until they found a room that the owner kept suspiciously locked: there were several witchcraft books, bloody clothes of boys and girls, large amounts of human fat kept in glass jars, a large skinning knife and the bones of at least twelve boys and girls kept in a large sack.
As he confessed at the police station, his procedure was as follows: Dressed in tattered rags as if she were a beggar, she stalked her victims and kidnapped them in the middle of the street. Once in her lair, he murdered them, draining their blood and fat. Then, at night, dressed in her best clothes, she would go to the central areas of the city where the wealthy people were concentrated and there she would contact them to trade their products, which were said to have both rejuvenating and healing properties of some. diseases typical of the time (for example, tuberculosis). She also admitted that there was a time when she had no luck in abducting children from her, so she opted to extract fat from stray animals like dogs and cats.
After her statement, she was sent to a women’s prison, where she attempted to take her own life twice, once trying to bite the veins out of her wrist. From that moment on, she was under the surveillance of three of the center’s most dangerous and respected inmates, to prevent other inmates from injuring her or doing it to herself again.
It is believed that his suicide attempt was to avoid giving in to pressure from the authorities to confess the names of the personalities he worked for, since it was always suspected that important families of the time could have been involved. 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 until they ended her life. The most suspicious have always considered the possibility that someone, from outside or inside prison, ordered his immediate execution. Unfortunately, the case was in the investigation phase, so it was not tried nor could the whole truth be known.
The Boogeyman
Who hasn’t heard of “The Boogeyman”? In Spanish folklore, in ancient times 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 he put in the large sack he carried with him and were never seen again.
Although one might think that it is a simple invention that arose to terrify the little ones and make them obey, the truth is that this legend has its origin in the so-called “sacamantecas” or “sacauntos” that, at the beginning of the 20th century, They murdered several children in different areas of Spain. At a time when famine was severely ravaging rural areas, many saw the opportunity to make easy money by murdering and extracting ointments from young children, then selling them to better-off people in the form of poultices or ointments.
Juan Díaz de Garayo, in Vitoria; or José González Tovar, in Malaga are some examples that occupy positions of dubious honor in the dark history of Spain and that, without a doubt, we will take care of addressing in future publications.
