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endar_hendarto via Flickr1 of 10
Every day it seems like somebody's reinventing the classic monsters of yesteryear, from SF author Peter Watts' meticulously detailed concept of vampires as emotionless semi-human apex predators suffering epileptic reactions to intersecting right angles to fantasy author Anne Rice's concept of vampires as mysterious sexy boys who are vaguely menacing.
But where did we first get the monster archetypes that authors and filmmakers seem so committed to re-inventing? The answer to this is a history of deformity, madness, and swamp gases-a whole spectrum of bizarre scientific phenomena that pre-scientific people had no way of comprehending except by wetting their pants, pointing their fingers and screaming "MONSTER!!!!"
MANICURE OF THE DAMNED
Today it's a commonly held belief that your hair and fingernails keep growing after death. But in medieval Europe, disinterring a recently-buried corpse with long hair and nails was pretty concrete proof that you had just discovered a vampire, albeit too late to do anything about it besides hammer in a stake and call a priest just to make sure he wasn't coming back.
In fact, the apparent "growth" is just the effect of skin and muscle slowly wasting away and revealing more of the nail or hair underneath, which is sort of gross to think about but poses very little supernatural threat.
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Wikimedia Commons2 of 10
THE UNQUIET DEAD
Another nail-related phenomenon, often remarked upon by medieval grave-robbers as proof of the undead, was the occasional case of someone who would be unearthed with shredded, splintered fingertips and scratches all over the inside of their coffins.
Medical science at the time wasn't capable of much more than splinting legs and covering people with leeches, but people were generally fairly confident that when the town doctor/priest/barber declared somebody dead that person was dead.
The idea that somebody could be so ill that they merely appeared dead didn't really show up outside of variations on the Sleeping Beauty theme until the cholera epidemics of the 18th and 19th centuries. A growing understanding of comas and trances blew up into a widespread public phobia of being buried alive.
This phobia was most famously reflected in the stories of Edgar Allan Poe, but it also led to the creation of a cottage industry building "safety coffins." They were askets rigged with special "holy crap I am still alive get me out of here" signals like bells, flags, and even fireworks-although a number of these coffins possessed a pretty glaring design flaw by lacking any sort of air supply.
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3 of 10
ZOMBIES, WHITE AND OTHERWISE
It can be hard to keep track of all the different types of fictional zombie these days, especially since the original Haitian zombie's powers were really just limited to unpleasant manual labor and moaning.
Although the Vodou tradition is native to West Africa and includes several aspects of zombie lore, "real" zombies seem to have been limited to Haiti itself, where legend ties it to the "Zombie Cucumber" AKA jimson weed or datura.
In small doses, datura can be a useful analgesic, in large doses it can be painfully lethal, but in just the right dose it inflicts delirium, hallucination, photophobia, and amnesia-an ideal way to make someone feel like they've died, gone to Hell, and come back a weird shell of a person.
On the other hand, researchers have found "zombies" suffering from schizophrenia or brain damage that were apparently never dosed with datura, suggesting that what really makes a zombie is a culture that absolutely believes in their existence combined with people who can and will ruthlessly exploit the mentally ill.
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Carpathian Bronze4 of 10
DISEASED, DEFORMED, AND DAMNED
Porphyria is a rare hereditary disease inhibiting the body's ability to produce certain organic compounds. It's a deceptively dry definition for a condition that can manifest itself in a number of horrific ways, including photosensitivity, flesh necrosis, increased hair growth, constant debilitating pain, and mental disorders ranging from paranoia to hallucination.
The disease was only clinically described in 1874, but many historians and folklorists have connected it to classic descriptions of werewolves, vampires, and other strange-looking creatures that hid from the sun, as most of the porphyria subtypes are associated with disfiguring skin lesions that become even more painful when exposed to sunlight.
Today porphyria can be tested for, treated, and lived with, but in a world dominated by fear and superstition, sufferers of the disease were exiled if lucky and murdered if not.
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Wikimedia Commons5 of 10
DAWG WILL HUNT (FRENCH PEOPLE)
Most wolves generally avoid contact with humans and attack only when backed into a corner, but most wolves are not the semi-legendary Beast of Gévaudan, an enormous wolf or wolves that killed 113 people over the course of three years in the south of France.
A team of elite hunters dispatched by King Louis XV managed to bring down a giant wolf-like animal near the Abbaye des Chazes that surviving witnesses identified as the beast in question. But two years later a new giant wolf emerged near la Besseyre Saint Mary and the killings began again.
This time, the creature was felled by local hunter and inn-keeper Jean Chastel, who the beast surprised while he was praying. Unshaken, Chastel finished his prayer and shot the beast through the heart with a bullet that later storytellers claimed was forged from the silver of a molten medallion of St. Mary, an obvious reflection of the werewolf myth.
Naturalists analyzing the Gévaudan legend came to conclude that the beast was actually a wolf-dog crossbreed, explaining its unusual size, fur, and behavior, and some suspect Jean Chastel of having a greater role in the legend than previously understood.
The man was known for owning a huge mastiff with similar markings to the other wolf-dogs, and some believe that Chastel may have trained the second beast by himself so he could eventually win fame and wealth from its death.
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Wikimedia Commons6 of 10
SHE'S A KILLER! COUNTESS
Being a serial killer in the time before organized police or detective work was already pretty easy, but being a serial killer of noble birth was so easy that it was likely that the prey/peasantry under your dominion would start thinking of you as a supernatural demon.
Countess Elizabeth Báthory de Ecsed is the most infamous example. As the most prolific murderess in history (convicted of 80 killings and suspected of up to 650), she is also popularly believed to have killed her young victims in order to bathe in their supposedly beauty-sustaining blood.
The bloodbath myth is a semi-modern invention intended to make the Countess a supernatural monster for propaganda purposes when the reality was much more disturbing. Like many modern psychopaths, Báthory simply enjoyed watching her victims suffer as they died.
Her noble status protected and enabled her sadistic career until she finally fell afoul of Hapsburger interests, who either wanted to neutralize her as a possible political force or were annoyed at her switch from the torture and murder of peasant women to the torture and murder of women with land, titles, and heritage.
At any rate, they finally condemned her to spend the rest of her days in a few sealed rooms of her castle, rather than the traditional punishment of death by dynamite and laser beam.
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Wikimedia Commons7 of 10
COUNT DRACULA TAKES A BITE OUT OF CRIME
Ask any Romanian or Bulgarian about Vlad III Drăculeşti and they'll be happy to tell you about the beloved Voivod of Wallachia, a valiant warrior prince and stern-but-fair ruler who would not tolerate any form of theft, assault, or rape, even when committed by the wealthy and corrupt boyar class that dominated early Romanian society.
Ask anybody else about Vlad and they're going to mention all the people he killed with a gigantic wooden spike up their ass. There's no question that Count Dracula was really into the horrific practice of impalement-the popular nickname "Vlad the Impaler" is based not only on what the Ottomans called him as an epithet (Kazikili Bey) but on what his citizens called him as a term of endearment (Vlad Tepes).
But the savage ferocity he exhibited defending Romania and Bulgaria against the Turks was later used against him by enemies both foreign and domestic.
Fuzzy legends of Dracula erecting "forests" of impaled victims to demoralize invading armies soon evolved to tales of the Count spit-roasting babies of political rivals before ordering their mothers to chow down on their own offspring.
While Romanian literature portrays Vlad as a somewhat egalitarian ruler with an admittedly weird impalement fetish, the accounts of Germans, Russians, and Hungarians are full of cannibalism, blood-drinking, and the genesis of the modern European vampire legend, up to and including the traditional anti-vampire measure of impalement with a stake through the heart rather than the ass.
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Wikimedia Commons8 of 10
RYE CRIMES AND MISDEMEANORS: ERGOTISM AND WITCHCRAFT
If being subject to murderous overlords, huge vicious beasts, and bizarre untreatable diseases wasn't hard enough on medieval peasants of Europe, there was always the chance that eating bread could drive you insane.
Rye and other cereal crops were susceptible to ergot, a fungi family containing hallucinogens similar to LSD and chemicals that caused painful spasms of the arms and legs, and when an ergot-tainted crop was harvested it typically meant an entire village seemed to suddenly go insane.
Unaffected visitors and onlookers often interpreted the spectacle the only way they knew how-evidence of witchcraft, either as a result of a curse (if the villagers were lucky) or active collusion with the forces of evil (if the villagers were not).
More modern processing and cooking techniques eventually cut down on ergot poisoning incidents, although some historians believe ergot to be the culprit behind the infamous Salem witch trials.
While only a few people were affected instead of the entire community, scientists believe this could be due to the ergot being neutralized enough by cooking process to only affect those with stomach ulcers, which would've allowed a direct route to the bloodstream.
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Wikimedia Commons9 of 10
FIRE IN THE SKY, SMOKE ON THE WATER
Mysterious lights in spooky swamps have been seen and described by every culture possessing both swamps and an awareness of spookiness, but for centuries they eluded any sort of scientific explanation other than "maybe something is on fire."
As it turned out, this was correct in only a few cases, as some ghost lights could ignite pieces of paper or dry leaves while others not only wouldn't burn but would coat things in a mysterious oily goo.
Amazingly, the same phenomenon may be responsible for both types of light. Combinations of phosphorous, hydrogen, and carbon result in compounds that can be rich with methane (making them flammable) or phosphane (making them glow) or phosphorous pentoxide (leaving mystery acidic goo).
Other theories include the "cold flame" phenomenon where materials at just below the heat of ignition give off flame-like halos, piezoelectric reactions in the soil of the swamp, or even (relatively) simple bioluminescence.
In the end, the point is sort of moot, as many of the swamps and wetlands where these lights are observed have been drained, eliminating whatever unique natural conditions that generate these lights and/or displacing many native ghost communities.
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Wikimedia Commons10 of 10Next: These Images Are NOT Photoshopped
SOUNDS AND WONDERS
Infrasound, the range of sonic frequencies below human hearing, has been found to have weird and unpredictable effects on certain people, ranging from emotional reactions like fear and dread to physical injury like nausea and even bleeding from the ears.
While conspiracy theorists have latched on to infrasound as one of the many ways the government can make you look like a paranoid schizophrenic even though you totally aren't one, scientists are examining infrasound effects as a possible source of paranormal phenomena.
One particularly notable case was that of British engineer Vic Tandy, who was working alone in a research lab that was widely believed to be haunted only to find himself cold, anxious, and no longer alone-a shapeless grey apparition was lurking in his peripheral vision, only to vanish when he spun to confront it.
Frightened but stubborn, Tandy returned the following day to use the lab's vice to work on his fencing blade and noticed that the clamped blade vibrated wildly even though everything else in the room was quiet and still.
Vic hit upon the idea of infrasonic vibration causing the blade's vibration as well as the weird emotional effects, and when the sonic culprit was discovered (a wobbly ventilation fan) it was found that it created infrasonic waves on the resonant frequency of the standard human eyeball, distorting vision so badly that Tandy and others were seeing things that didn't exist.
Tandy went on to explore the infrasonic properties of many other ostensibly haunted spaces, proving that there are some things that go bump in the night that you can't even hear, but they're still likely to scare the crap out of you.
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