Real vampires and werewolves

Dr. Richard von Krafft-Ebing

Throughout the ages, attacks on people have been attributed to supernatural creatures like werewolves and vampires, but in 1886, a German neurologist named Richard von Krafft-Ebing noted the compulsive and sexual presentation of the attacks. He wrote about them in Psychopathia Sexualis, and many of his 238 case histories concerned a violent eroticism triggered by blood.

What seems to inspire the psychopathic or psychotic mind is the aspect of dominance mixed with blood. Many sexually compulsive murderers have described their excitement over seeing a victim's blood.

"A great number of so-called lust murders," says Krafft-Ebing, "depend upon combined sexual hyperesthesia and parasthesia. As a result of this perverse coloring of the feelings, further acts of bestiality with the corpse may result." He also points out that it's generally accepted among experts on serial sex crimes that white males commit most of the truly perverse acts.

James Riva claimed to hear the voice of a vampire in April, 1980, before he shot his grandmother four times with bullets that he had painted gold. He then tried to drink her blood from the wound in order to get eternal life. Finally, he set her corpse on fire. Carol Page documents his tale and includes her interview with Riva in “Bloodlust: Conversations with Real Vampires.”

To some degree, he claimed, it was self defense, because he was convinced she was drinking his blood while he was asleep. He believed that everyone was a vampire and that he needed to become like them. The secret, he was told by imaginary voices, was to kill someone and drink the blood. Afterward, the vampires would throw a party for him.

Fascinated with vampires since the age of 13, he drew pictures of violent acts and began to eat things with a blood-like consistency. He killed animals, including a horse (he says), to drink their blood. He also punched a friend in the nose and tried to spear another in order to get blood from them, and claimed that he had attacked strangers to get it, but didn't want to kill anyone. He kept an ax by his bedroom door and once told a psychiatrist he was going to kill his father.

Riva told a psychiatrist about the voices warning him to watch out for vampires. They said that he had to drink blood. He decided that his grandmother was using an ice pick at night to get his blood—although she was in a wheelchair. He also believed that she was poisoning his food. On the day that he killed her, he felt he was going to die.

A jury returned a verdict of second degree murder, with a life term. He stopped drinking blood in prison, he said, because he couldn't get enough and he thought his body, used to human tissue consumption, was metabolizing his.

EXAMPLES:
1) Born in 1560, Erzebet grew up experiencing uncontrollable seizures and rages. Eventually she married a sadistic man who taught her cruel methods by which to discipline the servants, such as spreading honey over a naked girl and leaving her out for the bugs. He also showed Erzebet how to beat them to the edge of their lives.

After he died in 1604, Erzebet moved to Vienna. She also stepped up her cruel and arbitrary beatings and was soon torturing and butchering the girls. She might stick pins into sensitive body parts, cut off someone's fingers, or beat her about the face until the bones broke. In the winter, women were dragged outside, doused with water, and left to freeze to death. Even when Erzebet was ill, she didn't stop. Instead she'd have girls brought to her bed so she could bite them.

It was only when she turned her blood-thirst to young noblewomen, that she got caught. After a murder in 1609 that Erzebet tried to stage as a suicide, the authorities decided to investigate. They arrested her the following year.

Erzebet went through two separate trials, and during the second one, a register in her own handwriting was discovered in her home that included the names of over 650 victims. Found guilty, she was imprisoned for life in a small room in her own castle, where she died three years later. It was afterward that rumors spread about how she'd bathed in the blood of her young victims.

2) Once he was in custody, Peter Kürten confessed to everything. He explained that he'd committed numerous assaults and 13 murders, and admitted to drinking the blood from many of his victims because blood excited him. He'd once bitten the head off a swan, he stated, and ejaculated as he drank its blood. Looking back at the 1913 incident in the inn, Kürten described how he broke into the room, choked the girl, and cut her throat. He recalled how the blood had spurted into an arc over his head, which had excited him to orgasm, and then he drank some. It was his own handkerchief, with the initials, P.K. that had been found there.

There were other murders, he added, that inspired him to drink blood from throat wounds he made, and a couple of times he became sexually excited after taking a hatchet to a stranger.

At his trial, defense psychiatrists declared him insane, but the jury ignored them. He was sentenced on nine counts of murder to be executed in 1931. Just before dying, when some express remorse, Kürten expressed a desire to hear his own blood bubble forth after the blade came down.


Peter Kürten