Free Vampires Through the Ages by Brian Righi Page A

Eastern church, even if some of the meaning has been lost, and from time to time news reports crop up detailing an incident among some isolated community regarding a belief in vampires. Throughout its long and storied history, the church’s view of vampires has changed according to the age it found itself in, but there is no denying its involvement in the folklore of the creatures.
    Yet even as the church encouraged the view that it was the people’s champion against all that was evil in the world, somewhere along the way it discovered a powerful and dangerous tool in its struggle against the vampire. A little bit of fear, it quickly learned, went a long way in controlling the masses, and what better way to fill the coffers and bring in the flock each Sunday then to encourage the notion that vampires indeed existed. On the one hand, the church appeared to offer a solution to the vampire plagues and vowed to fight the creatures at every turn, while on the other hand it breathed new life into it for its own ends. Who knows if the legends of the vampire would even exist today if it hadn’t been for the church? Ironic that what the church sought to destroy, it only ensured for generations to come.
    [contents]

As a general rule, however, when man meets vampire, one of them will die. While the means whereby vampires kill men are fairly limited, the means whereby men kill vampires are diverse.
    â€”Paul Barber, Vampires, Burial,
and Death: Folklore and Reality
    4
    Let’s Get Ready
to Rumble
    Clad in dark sunglasses and a long leather overcoat, the man stood amid the circle of snarling vampires with a sneer of contempt upon his face. Neither side moved for what seemed an eternity until suddenly the lone vampire hunter shrugged off his long overcoat to reveal an arsenal of bristling weaponry. Covered in dark body armor, he sported a Benelli M3 shotgun with a pistol grip, a MAC-10 machine pistol, a bandoleer of silver stakes, and a deadly silver-bladed boomerang, but the killing instrument for which he was best known and feared was the razor-sharp sword of Damascus steel strapped to his back. A vampire snarled, baring her pointed canines, and charged in a blur of speed just as the vampire hunter drew his shotgun and fired. In the chaos that ensued, all hell broke loose as the vampire hunter battled his way through the crowd of vampires in a personal quest for revenge against the beasts that killed his mother.
    The 1998 blockbuster movie Blade introduced audiences to the fictional vampire hunter of the same name and helped to usher in a new archetype of vampire hunter that reached superhero proportions. Before the dawn of the new vampire hunter, the heroes of most vampire tales and movies usually consisted of more human characters, such as Bram Stoker’s Professor Van Helsing, who struggled against the creature with the more traditional weapons of cross and stake. In both cases, the avenging figures were mere protagonists in a fictional work, but the question remains as to how the common villager armed and defended himself against such a deadly foe. If so, then do the vampire hunters that fill our modern movies, comic books, and novels have a basis of reality resting somewhere in history’s dark past?
    Deadly Defenses
    To discover the answers to these and other questions we can turn back to the eyewitness accounts that surfaced during the great vampire scares of the eighteenth century. Although it’s easy to lose sight of in the horrific details that fill the reports, it’s important to note that they do in fact present two very fascinating sides of the same coin. On one we are given the bloody scenes of death and destruction that best characterize the habits and nature of the undead revenant, while the other offers a glimpse as to just how far a frightened mob will go to stamp out the evil menace.
    Cases such as those of Arnod Paole and Peter Plogojowitz, described in chapter 2, clearly demonstrate how