"There are such beings as vampires."

With those words, Dr. Van Helsing, in the novel Dracula, began his lecture on the powers of the undead. Of course, books like Dracula are fiction, right? Well, no one knows for sure, but here are the more famous vampires that have gone through history for their vampiric actions.

On the face of it, how can anyone believe that corpses can rise from their coffins at night to suck the blood of the living, make new vampires of their victims and return to the grave before daybreak? Sceptical minds find this incredible. Some say it is the silliest supersition of all.

Yet some people have believed in vampires all over the world since the earliest recorded times. Legends reach back many centuries before Christ to ancient Assyria and Babylonia - and always vampirism includes the drinking of blood, the life-giving fluid.

Aztecs poured blood into the mouths of their idols. In India, rajahs drank blood from severed heads. In China, the family would guard a corpse the night before burial lest a cat jump over the body and transform it into a vampire. The ancient Greeks and the Romans believed in a type of female vampire called a lamia who seduced men in order to suck their blood. Later, the Greeks had another word for the vampire - vrukalakos, a creature who was able to revive the dead and whose victims would then feast on the living. Anyone - male or female - with red hair, a birthmark, or even blue eyes was suspected of being a vampire. Blue eyes are rare in Greece. But those born on Christmas day, a seventh son, a person with a hare lip or anyone in the slightest bit unusual were also suspect, so many people fit the description of vampires. [See World].

As read above, the true home of a vampire, however, lies in eastern Europe and the vampire legend as we know it today, grew up in Romania and Hungary around the start of the sixteenth century. The word itself comes from a Slavonic term and did not exist in English until the 1730s. At that time, reports of vampires were numerous in eastern Europe. These accounts were picked up by travellers whose writings about them spread the vampire story all over Europe. Fiction then made the vampire famous. In the nineteenth century, best-selling horror writers seized on the vampire tale. Even great poets like Byron, Goethe and Baudelaire tried their hand with the vampire theme. It was the British author, Bram Stoker, however, who finally took the many jumbled strands of the vampire legend and wove them into the classic Dracula, which was published in 1897. His mixture of fact and fiction has dominated our conception of a vampire ever since. [See Literature]

There is a surprising weight of evidence in support of the vampire legend, much of it collected and endorsed by army surgeons. A classic case history of the time concerned a Hungarian soldier, who was billeted on a farm near the Austro-Hungarian frontier. He was eating with the farmer and his family one evening when they were joined by an old man. The soldier noticed that the family seemed extremely frightened of the man, who simply touched the farmer on the shoulder and then left. Next morning, the soldier learned that the farmer was dead. Apparently, the old man was the host's father and had been dead for 10 years. When he visited and touched his son, he both announced and caused that son's death.

When the soldier told the story to the other men in his regiment and the old man was soon  labelled a vampire. For although he had not taken blood from his son, his coming showed him to be a member of the living dead and he had certainly brought about his son's death. The affair was beginning to spread alarm among the soldiers, so it was investigated by the infantry commander, some other officers and a surgeon. The farmer's family was questioned under oath, testimony was taken from villagers and eventually the old man's grave was opened. his body looked like that of a man who had died recently - not 10 years earlier - and 'his blood was like that of a living man'. The commander of the regiment ordered that the vampire's head be cut off and the body was laid to rest again.

There were so many such reports of vampirism in the mid eighteenth century that it was said by one surgeon to have 'spread like a pestilence through Slavia and Wallachia... causing numerous deaths and disturbing all the land with fear of the mysterious visitors against which no one felt himself secure.'

One of the chief reasons for people's acute fear of vampires is their alleged power to infect victims with their own insatiable lust for blood. According to some traditions, only people who die from loss of blood after repeated vampire attacks will become vampires themselves. Other vampire tales maintain that one or two attacks are enough and that any victim of a vampire will come back as a new vampire after his or her natural death. The vampire is said to hypnotize its victims while it feeds, so that the person remembers nothing of the gruesome experience but simply complains of disturbed sleep and a strange lack of energy.  Thus the vampire can safely return night after night to the same victim if it wishes, until that victim grows progressively more anaemic and dies. Sometimes there are the tell-tale puncture wounds on the on the victims' neck. In that case, they believe in vampires, they may well suspect their plight.

There are other vampire stories, however, which are farm from entertaining and which stem from genuine fear. It was part of the vampire legend that people who were outcasts of society in life would remain outcasts after death and might return as vampires. This compares to the western European folklore that an evil-doer - or the victim of evil - is often fated to return after death as a ghost. the Church may have found it useful not to discourage this belief that served as  a warning to the guilty. In eastern Europe around 1645, it was stated that people who had led a 'wicked and debauched life' or had been 'excommunicated by their bishop' were likely to be condemned to the fate of the vampire, forever searching fort he peace that was denied to them. The same threat applied to all suicides, those buried without the proper religious sacraments, perjurers, people who died under any kind of curse and, in Hungary, to the stillborn illegitimate children of parents who were also illegitimate. In other words, anyone who had defied the social conventions of the times might become a vampire after death.

There are perfectly reasonable explanations for the proliferation of the vampire legend, but nevertheless the doubts remain. As the curtain fell on the first stage productions of Dracula, the producer Hamilton Deane came out in front of the curtain to warn the audience to take care as they went home.

'Remember', he cried in sepulchral tones, 'There are such things!'