"… But instead of answering the kiss, she dug her teeth into the man's neck, so that blood appeared." I never considered myself Dracula, - she said, - rather a bad person who loves the taste of blood. "The second vampire was a young man of named Karl Johnson, who snuck into his sister's bedroom at night, pierced her leg and sucked blood. So, according to him, he could quench his thirst, and it gave him strength …."
Fritz Haarmann became famous in the 1920s under the nickname Hanoverian Bloodsucker. He was the youngest son of a rude, uncouth worker and lived in the industrial city of Hanover, hating and fearing his father. In adolescence, he was detained for bullying his younger children, but, ascertaining the limitations of his mental development, the court found him insane and sent him for treatment.
Haarman escaped from the hospital and returned home, and then after several major quarrels, his father sent him to the army. But he did not serve long and, released due to illness, was again at home. He was repeatedly arrested for hooliganism and robbery. After serving his sentence, in 1918 he seemed to start a normal life, opening a butcher's shop and amassing a considerable capital in the hungry post-war period. At the same time, he became an informant for the Hanoverian police, informing her about the criminal elements in the city, since he knew them well. As it turned out later, he used his connection with the police to carry out terrible bloody deeds.
Near the railway station of Hanover, there were constantly many boys and young people who moved from city to city in search of work. Since the police knew Haarman as their assistant, he was allowed to enter the third class waiting room at night. There he woke up some guy sleeping on a bench, officially demanded to show a ticket, asked where and why he was going. Then, in an outburst of supposed benevolence, he offered to spend the night with him in more tolerable conditions. Few had a sixth sense of Haarman's vile intentions. Most of the young people obediently followed him like lambs.
In the closet behind the store, Haarman, a strong man of large build, strangled his victim and sank his teeth into her throat. Few invented vampires could compete in bloodlust with this living bloodsucker!
The career of a vampire ended unexpectedly, barely having time to begin, thanks to a thin sheet of paper. His first victim was a 17-year-old Friedel Rothe. He sent a postcard to his mother, who received it at the very time when her son fell victim to Haarman. Rothe reported that he had just been offered shelter by some "detective." The worried mother reported to the Hanover police, and they quickly figured out that this "detective" could most likely be Haarman. We went to his apartment. He was caught with another victim and arrested. At that time, the police did not manage to find the severed head of Friedel Rothe, which, as Haarman showed years later, "was hidden under a newspaper behind a curtain." He later threw her into the canal.
However, instead of convicting the killer, he was sentenced to nine months in prison for … indecent behavior.
And of course, when he was released, he continued his criminal practice!
According to official figures, Haarman's victims were 24 young men before he was captured again, although some witnesses claimed that he killed and drank 50 young men. The oldest was 18 and the youngest 12. Haarman was assisted in his seven-year epic of murders by a certain Hans Granet. This outwardly unremarkable young man, who did not arouse the slightest suspicion, often led to the maniac of his future victims; he lured one boy just because he liked his new trousers, another because of his bright shirt.
Haarman was helped to conceal the consequences of the atrocities due to the proximity of the canal, which ran behind his house. The many skulls and bones found in it in the spring of 1924 became material evidence of his crimes.
… The clouds thickened at another attempt to lure a young man named Fromm. He began to loudly object and resist, which attracted the attention of the police. Both were detained. The police searched Haarman's home and found several dismembered bodies. The maniac himself admitted 27 murders, but the police were never able to prove some of them. However, no details of the atrocities caused such a shock to the inhabitants of Hanover as one detail of the indictment: Haarman added meat from the soft parts of the body of his victims to sausages, which he not only ate himself, but also sold to visitors to his shop.
At the trial in 1924, when he was charged with 24 murders, he declared that he was insane and was in a state of trance when committing atrocities. The court rejected this statement, taking into account the "purposeful deliberate activity" of selecting victims and luring them to my home and also "butchering" bodies. The court sentenced him to death, and Grans - to life imprisonment. And although the word "vampirism" was not officially spoken at the trial, the death penalty was ordered through beheading.
On April 15, 1925, the head of a Hanoverian vampire rolled into a basket, chopped off by a heavy blade of a sword - an unusual method for killing criminals in 20th-century Europe. Summers did not find this surprising: “It was more than just a coincidence with the usual vampire practice of separating the head from the body. This is the most effective way to eliminate villainy."
… Peter Courten "went hunting" at night. Both people and animals became its victims. One night in the Hofgarten, a national park in Düsseldorf, he attacked a sleeping swan, cut off its head and drank its blood. From 1923 to 1929, Courten committed 7 murders (strangulation) and 20 arson. The victims of the two crimes managed to survive, and rumors of the killer spread throughout the area. One day, Courten met with Maria Dadlik, and she, fascinated by his appearance and manners, agreed to go to his house. There they drank tea, but when he began to pester, Maria demanded that he take her to the hotel where she was staying. Kurt agreed, but instead took her into the woods and tried to strangle her. Then he behaved rather strangely: he asked if she remembered where he lived. Maria lied, saying that she didn't remember.
Then Courten took her to the road and left. Maria put the police on the trail of Curten. Shortly before his arrest, he confessed to his wife of his crimes, and she called the police. Peter Courtenu's head was beheaded on July 2, 1931.
It should be noted that in the following years, cases of mass murder similar to the practice of Fritz Haarmann and Peter Kurten began to occur more often in the Western world. In the 40s, the Englishman John George Haig was sentenced to death for the murder of 20 people: he drank their blood and then dissolved the bodies in acid; on Fleet Street he was nicknamed the Sour Bath Vampire.
Guy became famous after World War II. It all started after he began to dream that he was in the forest, where the trees turned into bleeding bodies. Then a man invites him to drink blood from a bowl. Guy tries to chase this man, but he can not catch up with him. In his sleep, he never tasted blood. Guy felt that dreams are like an omen, a call to kill and drink blood. Indeed, when he began to commit crimes, the dreams stopped.
Guy was arrested when he committed the ninth murder. Mrs. Durand-Decon was a friend of Guy, he invited her to his "laboratory", where he allegedly was engaged in the cultivation of artificial nails. Guy shot her in the head with a.38 revolver. He later confessed that he cut the woman's neck, collected the blood in a glass and drank it. Then he took the jewelry off her and put the body in a large tank of sulfuric acid. His mistake was that he planted Mrs. Durand-Decon's jewelry and the police tracked him down. Guy confessed to this and all other crimes and was hanged.
… In the late 1950s, a quiet and unnoticed bachelor of science Eddie Gein from Wisconsin, USA, was caught in his country home compiling a collection of skins, heads and other body parts of at least ten people. He confessed to killing two people, claiming that he got the rest by robbing graves.
One night in January 1973, John Pye, a young British police officer, was assigned to investigate the death of a man. However, literally an hour later, a seemingly ordinary incident turned into one of the strangest incidents the police have ever encountered. Constable Pye found the deceased's room plunged into darkness. The owner seemed to be afraid of the electric light, since not a single lamp was visible anywhere in the apartment. But the beam of the lantern illuminated an unusual picture. She clearly indicated that the owner intended to repel the vampires. Salt was scattered throughout the room and on the blanket. A bag of salt was next to the dead man's head, another at his feet. The deceased apparently mixed salt with his urine in various containers placed around the room. Outside, on the windowsill,the police found an overturned bowl covering a mixture of human excrement and garlic.
The deceased was Demetrius Miikiura, a Polish émigré who settled in Britain 25 years ago, shortly after World War II. He worked as a potter in Stoke-on-Trent, the center of the pottery industry in England. It was a place far from traditional vampire sanctuaries, such as the Transylvanian forests in Romania. Stoke-upon-Trent is an industrial city with factory-polluted air and mountains of slag. Opposite the train station is a large, old-fashioned hotel, in front of which is a statue of the city's most famous resident, Josia Wedgwood, who brought pottery to a grand scale there. Narrow dark streets with small houses diverge from here in all directions. It was in this part of the city that Miykiura lived in one of the old houses. The houses looked gloomy and even ominous. Local witches called them simply “villas”. Miykiura died in "villa" number three.
As expected, the body was brought in for autopsy. The pathologist found that Miykiura choked on pickled onions. The investigator found this strange, noting that not so often people "swallow food without chewing and die." The young policeman could not get out of his mind the picture he saw. He went to the public library and sat down to Anthony Masters' Vampire Story. As he read, his suspicions intensified: salt and garlic were traditionally used against vampires, as the smell of garlic is believed to be harmful to them. Having found out all this, the investigator insisted on re-examining the corpse. It was discovered that the cause of death was a clove of garlic. The unfortunate man went to extreme measures: he slept with garlic in his mouth to protect himself from vampires. One way or another, the vampires managed to get their way.
Who are these vampires who literally scared poor Miykiuru to death? Prejudice? Maybe. And yet Miykiura believed in them. He was convinced that vampires existed - and not only in the remote forests of Transylvania. Demetrius Miikiura believed he was in danger in a British city in the 70s.
“This man sincerely believed,” the investigator noted later. He denied that Miykiura was crazy, possibly "obsessed with an idea." The Pole, born in 1904, lost everything in the Second World War. His wife and all family members were killed and the farm was destroyed by the Germans. He came to England with nothing to heart.
“As a lawyer,” said the investigator, “I dealt with a variety of cases. I saw a lot of debauchery, nonsense, but I can understand what has accumulated in the soul of this person. A lot of evil fell to his lot. Great, he thought, I accept the challenge, and he convinced himself of the existence of vampires. I am convinced that this man was actually really afraid of vampires and did not die of his own free will.
Even in New York, seemingly the least attractive place for vampires, two strange incidents have occurred relatively recently, described by writer Jeffrey Blyth. The girl, who identified herself as Lilith, told two psychologists that she met a young man in the cemetery, who stuck to her and tried to kiss her. But instead of answering the kiss, she sank her teeth into the man's neck, so that blood came out. "I never considered myself Dracula," she said, "rather, a bad person who loves the taste of blood." The second vampire was a young man named Karl Johnson, who snuck into his sister's bedroom at night, pierced her leg and sucked blood. So, according to him, he could quench his thirst, and this gave him strength.
In 1974, there was talk of vampire hunters again. This happened during the second trial of David Farrant, President of the British Occult Society, who was called "Eminence" in court. Although they tried not to spread too much about it due to the horrific details of the case, the newspapermen nevertheless did their job, penning front-page headlines such as: "Leprosy in the Catacombs", "Eminence Lectures on Witchcraft." Speaking of girls dancing naked at witchcraft gatherings, the judge said dryly, but rightly, that it was probably rather cold for them to dance like that in October.
And this is what happened. After Farrant claimed in a 1970 television interview that a seven-foot-tall vampire had been spotted in Highgate Cemetery, hundreds of vampire hunters rushed to the location. A case was opened against Farrant. The astonished judges were examining a case in which it was said that the graves were destroyed and the corpses mutilated with iron lances. (The bodies were subsequently placed as neatly as possible in their places, so as not to disturb the feelings of the relatives.) In Farrant's house, photographs of naked girls were found in one of the cemetery mausoleums, and the policeman reported that salt was sprinkled near the windows near the door. and a large wooden cross hung at the head of the coffin. It was also revealed that Farrant had sent needle-studded voodoo dolls to the police.
Farrant was accused of destroying the cemetery, visiting crypts on the sacred ground of the cemetery and desecrating the remains, "which was a trampling on religion, decency and morality and led to a scandal." Farrant, while agreeing that he sometimes held occult meetings at Highgate Cemetery, denied all charges and argued that a satanic sect and vandals were responsible for the destruction. He was found guilty and sentenced to nearly five years in prison.
There is a tendency, not without reason, to attribute such cases to mental disorders of the persons involved. However, not far from Highgate Cemetery, there was a man who took vampire tales seriously. It was the Reverend Christopher Neil-Smith, the leading British exorcist writing on the subject. He talked about several cases where people turned to him for help in connection with vampires. “One of the cases that struck me the most,” Neil-Smith wrote, “involved a woman who showed me marks on my wrists that appeared overnight: blood was definitely being sucked from the wounds. There was no reasonable reason for this. It looked like an animal bite. Something like a scratch. Neil-Smith did not believe that a woman could inflict these wounds on herself. She came to him when she felt that blood was being sucked from her,and after the exorcism the marks disappeared.
Another man came from South America, what happened to him, according to Neil-Smith, "something similar, at night it was like an animal attacked him and sucked blood." Again, he could find no explanation. There was also a case with a man who, after the death of his brother, had a strange feeling that blood was slowly flowing out of his veins. “There was evidence of this,” says Neil-Smith, “before that he was an absolutely normal person, but after the death of his brother, it began to seem to him that life was leaving him, as if the spirit of his brother was nursing through him. When the exorcism was performed, he perked up, as if fresh blood was flowing through his body again. " Neil-Smith rules out the possibility of a simple psychological explanation for this incident, for example, feelings of guilt towards a deceased brother: “There was no disagreement between them. Sometimes he wasn't sure himselfthat he (the vampire) was his brother."
The clergyman defines the vampire as "half animal, half human" and absolutely denies the assumption that this phenomenon is "sheer fiction." “I think it's too naive to think so,” he says. "The facts show otherwise." Claiming that vampirism exists, he identifies this strange belief with a stable form of devilish cult.
In the 60s, 70s and 80s, a series of reports of serial murders filled the front pages of newspapers: Charles Manson family, Yorkshire ripper, Boston and Los Angeles strangler from Hillside, John Gacy, Charles Bad weather, Ted from the Embankment - these names were shocking public while their cases were being investigated. Of course, in no case can we talk about them as real vampires, but for sensationalism and a catchphrase, the writers referred them to such, as was the case with the Sour Bath Vampire.
A real vampire woman, allegedly a distant relative of the famous Bloody Countess from Hungary, Angela Boutros (see about her in the next part of this book) is wanted today by the police of two continents.
Law enforcement officials report that Angela Boutros committed the last crime in Dusseldorf, Germany, in September 1955. And now, according to the police, she left this country and is in the United States. “During a search of her gloomy apartment, we found a receipt for the purchase of an air ticket to America,” an investigator from Dusseldorf, Hugo Sterner, explains.
American intelligence agencies in search of a bloodsucker conduct round-the-clock surveillance in Boston, New York, Baltimore, Atlanta and Miami. It is known that Angela Boutros prefers to hide in areas with a developed underground transport network - the metro.
During a search of Boutros' apartment in Dusseldorf, a portrait of Erzsebet Bathory was found (a separate chapter of this book is devoted to her. And the detectives came to her lair after someone called them and told them the address where there are three homeless girls with slit throats. they found a diagram of a family tree in their apartment, at the top of which was Bathory, and at the very bottom - Boutros. Of
course, most police believe that the killer is an "ordinary" maniac who imagines herself the great-great-great-granddaughter of a vampire. However, some experts are convinced that they are dealing with a real female ghoul in whom the sinister inclinations of the Bloody Countess leaped …
Today, such killers are qualified only as mentally retarded, sociopaths, or simply carriers of universal evil. Ordinary people tend to view them as a modern phenomenon, a product of our unnatural, stressed society. Yet their behavior is by no means a new phenomenon. It is similar to what we have always attributed - wrongly - to wild animals: cruel and senseless killings. Not because of the need to survive, but because of passion or desire to satisfy an unknown dark inner need.
If we assume that in the world of vampires there is the same hierarchy as among people, then with Kane Preeli - another modern representative of vampirism - only Count Dracul can be compared. After Mrs. Presley from the city of El Paso, Texas, gave an interview to the author of the acclaimed US book about vampires "There's Something in the Blood", she is literally barred. Moreover, she receives a mountain of letters from journalists from Argentina, Venezuela, Mexico, France, England and Australia, who beg the vampire to talk to them. Reporters' interest in Presley is fueled by the fact that, according to the data in the book, there are about 8,000 vampires living in America today.
“I never expected to become either a star or a scarecrow,” says 38-year-old Ms. Presley, who has been in vampire for nearly 30 years. "Everyone is interested in about the same thing: do I sleep in a coffin and do I have fangs." And although he does not have and did not have fangs, many believe that there is something "vampire" in her appearance, for example, a thin, pale face framed by black hair. The vampire shea look is complemented by dark clothing and blood red lipstick.
According to Mrs. Presley, she needs one or two glasses of blood “like air” every day. She satisfies her need in the following way: either offers men sex in exchange for their blood, or turns to a local thrush, who gives her some cow's blood. For years, Presley was ashamed of her addiction and did not tell anyone about it except her closest friends. However, one of her friends could not keep his mouth shut, and the secret became known to Presley's acquaintances and employees. Some turned away from her, but many reacted calmly to her oddities.
Despite the excitement that has been raised around Presley, she is by no means burdened by public attention. “I want to make it clear to people that we are not murderers at all, but simply thirsty for blood,” she says. According to her, during the “meal”, she slightly cuts the “donor's” hand from the inside and sucks the blood very carefully so as not to stop the vein. “It's much more enjoyable than sex and much more intimate. And not only for me. People who donate their blood are very attached to me,”says Ms. Presley. Among the letters that the vampire receives, there are also proposals from voluntary donors. However, a very significant portion of the mail comes from detractors. So, for example, one man from Ohio promised to come and, as expected, stick a stake in a vampire. She meekly answered him: "Try it!"
Reprinted from the book: K. Nikolaev "Vampires and Werewolves".