Vampires

Vampyre, demon, nightstalker, blood sucker, vampire, alien? Vampires have been the center of many of our horror stories stretching back all the way to the beginning. They are without a doubt, the most recognizable of the monsters, with iterations as vast and varying as there is content.

Some stories portray them as brooding dark princes trying to seduce their way into a woman’s heart. Other stories have them descending on towns like a murder wave to snatch the easy and unaware. Many more see them as undead creatures, slumbering in coffins and in castles. Shifting their human form to bats and wolves to hunt and stalk their prey. While they all make for good stories, that’s not how they started at all. If it wasn’t for Bram Stoker, who decided to make what appears to be the first sexy vampire, they would be a different monster all together now.

Let’s start at the beginning, and hopefully by the end, I’ll have you convinced that they are probably aliens instead.

I’d like to start with my underlining theory: That vampires are actually a species of extraterrestrial creature that once existed on this Earth.

To further investigate my theory, we need to begin with the first vampire. This origin story dates back to ancient Mesopotamia, and is the first known tale to contain a blood sucking monster: The Edimmu.

The Edimmu or Ekimmu, were a type of utukku (demon), in the Sumerian religion. They were said to be the spirits of evil men or ones who were not buried properly. Once an Edimmu was unleashed, they would commit a litany of offenses on the living.

• Draining a body of blood
• Draining a life force from a body
• Possession of a person
• Cause disease
• Inspire crime
• Incite family disasters

The Edimmu seemed like a catch all for bad behaviors. The original boogeyman. They were incorporeal in most iterations, but could also be portrayed as winged demons, shadow men, zombies or even wind.

Shadow men stick out to me right away, for the simple fact that they exist even today. There are still plenty of sightings of such creatures in all different parts of the world. (Don’t worry they are getting their own page soon enough) Let’s focus on their most common iteration, incorporeal spirit.

Like a regular ole run-of-the-mill-demon, the Edimmu could inhabit a person’s body and had no real form. If you speak about it realistically (I know, real is a stretch but hear me out), demon possession or possession by an Edimmu is essentially just a parasite that has found a host. As we all know, parasites are very real and can duplicate most of these possession symptoms in the wild.

Some things parasites can do to a human:

• Draining a body of blood
• Draining a life force from a body
• Possession of a person
• Cause disease
• Inspire crime
• Incite family disasters

So it’s not completely unreasonable to imagine that vampires absolutely existed as some form of extraterrestrial parasite that had run rampant before the invention of modern medicine. Or maybe even evolved to remain undetected (less likely). What makes the vampire different from your average every day tapeworm is one thing, a conscious mind.

A normal parasite behaves in ways similar to that of an insect. Infection for survival and reproduction. A vampire infects it’s host and subsumes that person’s identity completely. They become the host. The host no longer exists in the conscious brain. Their personality, their memories, all gone once the fusion is complete.

It works similar to demonic possession. The demon enters, fights the host by wearing them down mentally and physically, slowly taking over their waking day. The demon can make a person recite languages they don’t know, secrets they’ve never been told, do things they would never normally do, they become a different person altogether. Demons and vampires used to be the exact same thing (Bram Stoker being the fork in the road for most lore).

Even long after the hungry ghosts and Edimmu, vampires that resemble the myth more closely today acted in much the same manner except for one thing, they had started inhabiting the dead. Folks had started building cages around graves so the recently dead could not rise and feed from the towns they once inhabited. Some even going so far as to to stake their dead if they thought they were leaving their coffins in the dead of night.

It was as though the vampire switching from possession of a live person to a dead corpse happened around the same time we as a society were starting to catch a real stride in terms of medical care. By making our bodies and our minds healthier, we had become stronger against the influences of this particular inter-dimensional being. The vampire being a survivor seemed just fine to inhabit our dead.

That of course, came with consequences to their way of operations. Blood transfusions were needed to keep the dead flesh from completely decaying, and they were more noticeable in city centers. They could no longer roam the streets as they wished but instead needed to stick to the shadows and hunt in the darkness. Now becoming nocturnal predators.

I’m not sure when they met their extinction, or if they ever really have. Knowing what we know about parasites and our own world, vampiric alien parasites aren’t that far outside the imagination.