So much is written and filmed today about vampires that it seems that they are quite real, albeit frightening, creatures, like cockroaches or rats. We forget that these monsters are just a fantasy of the Irishman Bram Stoker, who wrote the famous Gothic novel at the end of the 19th century. However, there are also known stories about real vampires …
One of many
He lived at the beginning of the 19th century in the Bavarian city of Würzburg, served as a military doctor, a certain Heinrich Spatz, handsome and well-bred, was happily married and had a decent fortune. He was respected by his neighbors (they say he generously donated to charity!), Respected by his colleagues - he wrote several famous works on military field surgery and the treatment of infectious diseases.
And suddenly … In 1831, Dr. Spatz unexpectedly sold his property and left for the Czech Republic at the invitation of the University of Prague - his alma mater. As soon as the dust from the wheels of the carriage of a respectable doctor had settled, two young doctors came running to the Würzburg police, who introduced themselves as assistants to the doctor who had departed for Prague.
They vied with each other that the Spatz were … vampires! At first, the police scoffed at the youngsters, saying that you drank beer yesterday, guys! But they pointed to the disappearance of several people who communicated with the Spatz family, for example, Joachim Faber.
He was a crippled, retired soldier who worked as a gatekeeper at a hospital for the poor, where Dr. Spatz frequently operated on and shared his medical skills with young doctors. Reluctantly, the police searched the luxurious mansion of the fashionable doctor, and found human remains in the basement!
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There were buried at least 18 people, and one skeleton without an arm, with traces of surgical amputation, belonged to the missing disabled Faber. Alas, others could not be identified.
Some people remembered that the good Doctor Spatz often undertook to arrange the fate of poor patients who were left with cripples. But who will miss these vagrants?
Snowball
The servants who worked in Spatz's house told during interrogations that none of them ever stayed in the house overnight - it was forbidden. So no matter how dirty experiments the family of a popular surgeon in the city puts there, there are no witnesses.
The authorities of the sleepy Würzburg had no choice but to contact the Prague police about, as they would now say, the extradition of Dr. Spatz. But in response, the officials read: "At the Prague University, such a gentleman did not appear and no one sent him any invitation."
The police are at a standstill. And when, six months later, one of the instigators of the investigation, a young man who told the world about the vampire-Spatz, committed suicide, the case fell apart. Moreover, the death of the main witness was so dramatic that everyone suspected the interference of evil spirits: he suddenly left home, abandoning his beloved wife and son, rented a basement in a poor suburb, broke all ties with relatives and did not go out into the light of day.
The wife, who somehow broke through to him, told later, sobbing that her husband looked very deplorable: he became as pale as death, thinned as a skeleton and ate only raw pig blood, which he bought from the butcher. The whole city discussed the strange diet of the escaped husband for a week, however, his next trick overshadowed the scandalous testimony of his grief-stricken wife: the young man hanged himself from the ceiling beam.
Fear and superstition have settled since that time in the hearts of the townspeople: they even talked about the curse of the vampire Spatz, about his secret organization, which takes revenge on peaceful inhabitants for persecuting the leader. And when the second informer died under the most nasty circumstances, everyone was simply speechless.
Vampire's revenge
Spatz's second assistant survived his colleague by only six months - he was killed with a poker by his own sister, finding him at a truly diabolical occupation: he drank the blood of his little nephew. The child's father had a lot of money to hush up this wild story, and gossip about the personality of Heinrich Spatz has become even more from that day.
It was said that before leaving the city, he managed to create a sect of Satanists, practicing human sacrifice. The most impressionable, of course, believed that he was a genuine vampire. And the most sober answered them that Spatz was simply engaged in an illegal business: he cut corpses, and at that time the dissection of the dead was considered a serious crime. His assistant informers were slightly moved by the experiments of their mentor and believed that their patron was a vampire.
One way or another, but in history, Dr. Spatz remained one of the most terrifying criminals - a real vampire. And modern psychiatry would say that he suffered from Renfield's syndrome, or clinical vampirism. Such patients are obsessed with a thirst for blood - they need to drink it, extracting it from people or animals, this is the essence of their mental pathology.
Forensic textbooks introduce several serial killers, called "bloodthirsty vampires" by the tabloid press. But the blood of innocent victims did not bring them immortality: they were all executed for their atrocities.
Inna SHEVCHENKO