A cold wind blew in from the sea and swept across the rugged Carpathian Mountains as the sky suddenly turned dark. Somewhere across the distant horizon, a lone wolf howled. Deep inside the woods, a little far away stood a tall, brooding castle. The heavy iron door studded with nails creaked and then slowly opened....

No, this is not a story on Count Dracula or sequel. This is about the myth relating to vampires and how it was created.

Since time immemorial man has been fascinated by the stories of ghosts, witches & vampires. This fascination is probably born of a fear and hence a belief in the existence of evil. In remote history every time there was a death and the cause of it not properly known or understood, the primitive man would tread on theories of the supernatural. Soon this fascination with vampires reached tremendous heights and some people, (many of them eminent historians and archaeologists) set out on a quest to find the truth behind the theory. These distinguished members of the society came to be known as “The Vampire Seekers”

These vampire seekers visited remote villages, places of mysterious deaths and spoke to the neighboring folks to dig up facts relevant for their research. One thing that came up was that in almost all the cases the victim could be traced back to some “odd queer looking man” (as described by the village folks) and who was also invariably never seen before and never again after those deaths. But the vampire seekers did not give up. They continued to study & research, visiting places after places and coming up with more relevant evidence. All their circumstantial evidence seemed to hint that the so called odd looking man (who was allegedly not human) was in some mysterious way the reason behind those deaths. The vampire theory was kind of sanctified in a way by those vampire seekers...and people started believing in the dead man walking ‘undead’ on New Moon.

Now, the subsequent developments in the fields of medicine were things that the vampire seekers could not have foreseen. They did not know that the so called mysterious deaths would someday be explained by the doctors as properly diagnosed diseases. For example tuberculosis. Many hundreds & thousands of people had already died of this disease before it came to be known as such.

With these medical advancements coming up, the vampire theory fell apart but the myth was set. And fuelled by Actor Christopher Lee as the majestic Prince of Darkness in the many movie adaptations of the Bram Stoker novel the myth continues to live amidst human fantasy...