What I am going to write about today might be disagreeable to many who are unlike me.

I am pretty interested in this subject and therefore decided to write about something so peculiar.

Most of us remember those fairy tales that we’ve heard from our grandparents and parents. We imagined in our childhood days of so many clouds, angels and birds and amidst them the fairy godmother ever ready to cast boons and save us from witches. We used to imagine huge castles and a beautiful princess waiting for their brave knights to wed them and set them free from some fiery monster.

To this day I haven’t been able to come out of that imaginative phase, and keep imagining of castles and caves, werewolves and vampires.

What if they existed in real in some part of this world which has been still unexplored by man? What if they knew exactly how to attack? What if they at some point of time walked past by you and you never realized? How do we distinguish them from normal persons?

To me, I feel that there must be some truth, some if not much to these legends.

These legends tell us about some werewolf sighting in some remote places in snowy areas back in seventeenth century. People would laugh at this. But given that there are pretty numbers of persons missing in every part of the world, it would add a little fuel to my thought.

Unlike the movies, they might be just as well dressed as you and me.
They were and are portrayed in movies as a wolf-man with beastly hair and claws that rip apart their victims and drink their blood.

Werewolves in movies are shown to get activated on the full moon night that is when they howl and set out for the prey. Vampires on the other hand, are shown to tear apart the side of the neck of their victims on the pretext of making love to them. Vampires, unlike werewolves are lesser beastly in appearance, and don’t have the claws and the hair of a wolf. Vampires are said to have razor sharp tooth though they are blood thirsty and kill to quench their thirst for blood unlike the werewolves who devour both on blood and flesh.

The concept of vampires and werewolves are ancient though people don’t believe in such myths these days. There are some murders that have been committed using the vampire rituals.

From Wikipedia Vampires article under psychopathology –

[A number of murderers have performed seemingly vampiric rituals upon their victims. Serial killers Peter Kürten and Richard Trenton Chase were both called “vampires” in the tabloids after they were discovered drinking the blood of the people they murdered. Similarly, in 1932, an unsolved murder case in Stockholm, Sweden was nicknamed the “Vampire murder”, because of the circumstances of the victim’s death.The late 16th-century Hungarian countess and mass murderer Elizabeth Báthory became particularly infamous in later centuries’ works, which depicted her bathing in her victims’ blood in order to retain beauty or youth.Vampire lifestyle is a term for a contemporary subculture of people, largely within the Goth subculture, who consume the blood of others as a pastime; drawing from the rich recent history of popular culture related to cult symbolism, horror films, the fiction of Anne Rice, and the styles of Victorian England.Active vampirism within the vampire subculture includes both blood-related vampirism, commonly referred to as sanguine vampirism, and psychic vampirism, or supposed feeding from pranic energy.]

One of the mass murderers was a countess called Elizabeth Báthory.

In 1610 and 1611, the notaries collected testimony from more than 300 witnesses. The trial records include the testimony of the four defendants, as well as thirteen witnesses. Priests, noblemen and commoners were questioned. Witnesses included the castellan and other personnel of Sárvár castle.

According to all this testimony, her initial victims were the adolescent daughters of local peasants, many of whom were lured to Čachtice by offers of well-paid work as maidservants in the castle.

Later, she is said to have begun to kill daughters of the lesser gentry, who were sent to her gynaeceum by their parents to learn courtly etiquette. Abductions were said to have occurred as well.

The descriptions of torture that emerged during the trials were often based on hearsay. The atrocities described most consistently included:

• severe beatings over extended periods of time, often leading to death
• burning or mutilation of hands, sometimes also of faces and genitalia
• biting the flesh off the faces, arms and other bodily parts
• freezing to death
• surgery on victims, often fatal
• starving of victims
• sexual abuse

The use of needles was also mentioned by the collaborators in court.
Some witnesses named relatives who died while at the gynaeceum. Others reported having seen traces of torture on dead bodies, some of which were buried in graveyards, and others in unmarked locations.

According to the testimony of the defendants, Elizabeth Báthory tortured and killed her victims not only at Csejte but also on her properties in Sárvár, Sopronkeresztúr, Bratislava, (then Pozsony, Pressburg), and Vienna, and even between these locations. In addition to the defendants, several people were named for supplying Elizabeth Báthory with young women. The girls had been procured either by deception or by force. A little-known figure named Anna Darvulia was rumored to have influenced Báthory, but Darvulia was dead long before the trial.

The exact number of young tortured and killed by Elizabeth Báthory is unknown, though it is often speculated to be as high as 650, between the years 1585 and 1610. The estimates differ greatly. During the trial and before their execution, Szentes and Ficko reported 36 and 37 respectively, during their periods of service. The other defendants estimated a number of 50 or higher. Many Sárvár castle personnel estimated the number of bodies removed from the castle at between 100 to 200. One witness who spoke at the trial mentioned a book in which a total of over 650 victims was supposed to have been listed by Báthory herself. This number became part of the legend surrounding Báthory.

Reportedly, diaries in Báthory’s hand are kept in the state archives in Budapest. Supposedly, the diaries are “difficult to read due to the condition of the material, the old language, the handwriting and the horrific content.]

Such incidents are horrific, but what if no one noticed them and the murderer was clever enough to erase all proofs pertaining to the murder of the victims? What then?

In the above case, the accused was a countess, therefore had a stand in the aristocratic class. To do such a horrible thing is insane.

Here is what Wikipedia says about Werewolves –

There is also a mental illness called lycanthropy in which a patient believes he or she is, or has transformed into, an animal and behaves accordingly. This is sometimes referred to as clinical lycanthropy to distinguish it from its use in legends. Despite its origin as a term for man-wolf transformations only, lycanthropy is used in this sense for animals of any type. This broader meaning is often used in modern fictional references, such as in roleplaying game culture The curse of lycanthropy was also considered by some scholars as being a divine punishment. Werewolf literature shows many examples of God or saints allegedly cursing those who invoked their wrath with werewolfism.

Those who were excommunicated by the Roman Catholic Church were also said to become werewolves.The power of transforming others into wild beasts was attributed not only to malignant sorcerers, but to Christian saints as well.

Omnes angeli, boni et Mali, ex virtute naturali habent potestatem transmutandi corpora nostra (“All angels, good and bad have the power of transmutating our bodies”) was the dictum of St. Thomas Aquinas.

St. Patrick was said to have transformed the Welsh king Vereticus into a wolf; Natalis supposedly cursed an illustrious Irish family whose members were each doomed to be a wolf for seven years.

In other tales the divine agency is even more direct, while in Russia, again, men supposedly became werewolves when incurring the wrath of the Devil.

A notable exception to the association of Lycanthropy and the Devil, comes from a rare and lesser known account of an 80-year-old man named Thiess. In 1692, in Jurgenburg, Livonia, Thiess testified under oath that he and other werewolves were the Hounds of God.

He claimed they were warriors who went down into hell to do battle with witches and demons. Their efforts ensured that the Devil and his minions did not carry off the grain from local failed crops down to hell. Thiess was steadfast in his assertions, claiming that werewolves in Germany and Russia also did battle with the devil’s minions in their own versions of hell, and insisted that when werewolves died, their souls were welcomed into heaven as reward for their service.

[Wikipedia – Werewolf]

Now these unfortunate incidents took place at a time when there was no much clinical psychiatric development, in any part of the world. The medics would call this some syndrome, but it sounds a lot more than some syndrome.

These sound like the accused were made to believe voluntarily or involuntarily in the satanic rituals involving cannibalism.

Also there is a possibility of the accused being possessed by the devouring destructive unclean ghostly spirits who want to create havoc in any form.

There are many such cases that mere clinical study can’t solve, and I guess these were only some of them.