Better Drive a Stake Through His Heart

Vampires walk among us. Or fly. And they're looking for your blood. A 19-year old Mexican migrant worker became the first person ever to die in the  U.S. from being bitten by a vampire bat.

While you may have thought vampires loved to sink their teeth into the carotid artery in your neck, popular culture has it all wrong. Apparently your heel is the sweet spot for these blood suckers. Seems the worker was walking in his home land of Michoacan when the attack happened. Ten days later he came to the U.S. to work on a sugar cane plantation in Louisiana and within 15 days of being bit took ill.

He subsequently died of the bite. No word if they severed his head when he was buried, or stuck a rock in his mouth, both common ways of dealing with possible vampires.

For the record, he contracted bat rabies and developed encephalitis, a swelling of the area around the brain. Having never received a rabies vaccine before, he quickly succumbed to the virus.

"Twilight" Material She's Not

There's something about a good vampire that draws you to them. Nosferatu, Dracula, even 'Salem's Lot (well, the book anyway) knew how to get you close enough to dig their fangs into you. "Twilight?" Not so much.

However, apparently you really shouldn't drink the water south of the border. This Mexican woman took the vampire culture to heart and decided to transform herself into a deathless creature, including having titanium implants inserted for horns. Then again, she is a lawyer and we all know what kind of bloodsuckers they can be.



As the gentleman at the end says, tattoos are a lifestyle choice and I've got more than my fair share of them, but methinks this woman has taken it a tad far.

Open Graves, Open Minds

Vampires are hiding out in academia. The University of Hertfordshire hosted a conference last month  entitled Open Graves, Open Minds to explore the "Americanization" of the undead in popular culture. But in typical professorial blather, they've managed to make vampires as unexciting as Twilight has. 

"The irony of creatures with no reflection becoming such a pervasive reflection of modern culture pleases in a dark way. Since their animation out of folk materials in the nineteenth century, by Polidori, as Varney and in Le Fanu and Stoker, vampires have been continually reborn in modern culture. They have stalked texts from Marx’s image of the leeching capitalist, through Pater’s Lady Lisa of tainted knowledge, to the multifarious incarnations in contemporary fictions in print and on screen. They have enacted a host of anxieties and desires, shifting shape as the culture they are brought to life in itself changes form. More recently, their less charismatic undead cousins, zombies, have been dug up in droves to represent various fears and crises in contemporary culture."

If you're still awake after that, this video from The Wall Street Journal (of all places) makes it seem much more interesting, particularly the part where they're eating "finger foods" out of a coffin replete with a skeleton. Looks like a lot of the Halloween parties I've seen.

While the program was put together by Dr. Sam(hain) George (heh!), it covered such gripping topics as identity politics, the metaphor of reflection, and "the artist as vampire Marx." I'm sure this was an excellent use of university resources, but somehow I think some of us haunters could have brought the conference to a much higher, more interesting level.

Rich