Vampirism: causes and real cases of this rare paraphilia
Vampirism or hematodipsia is one of the most twisted paraphilias : those who suffer from it feel an urgent need to ingest, perform treatments or rituals with blood (usually human), motivated many times by the belief that this liquid contains rejuvenating or life-prolonging magical properties.
What is vampirism? Causes and symptoms
A first possible explanation for this disorder lies in the possibility that those who ingest blood do so out of pure fetishism: in it they find the sexual pleasure necessary to carry out their most Machiavellian fantasies in which the red liquid is the protagonist.
Another of the causes commonly exposed is some type of traumatic experience during childhood that adults link to sexual stimulation. Psychologists agree that it is a mental disorder linked to sadism, which pushes those affected to hurt and assault others to achieve a specific purpose. Some experts have come to draw a parallel between vampirism and necrophilia.
Of course, we can get rid of the collective ideology left to us by literary works and vampire films. Those affected by hematodipsia do not use the blood they draw from their victims "to survive" or anything like that. It is a disorder more linked to the satisfaction of a pleasure resulting from the suffering of others .
Be that as it may, the causes of vampirism are under discussion, especially because of the few cases described historically.
Brief historical review of cases of hematodipsia
Several cases have marked the collective unconscious around this disease. Although many of these stories are real, movies and literature have led us to understand this phenomenon in a biased way. Anyway, these cases that we will relate below refer to people of flesh and blood who suffered vampirism .
The Impaler
The cult for blood and its alleged qualities has its roots in history and has given fame to celebrities such as Vlad Tepes "The Impaler" (S.XV).
This prince of Romania received his nickname for using impalement as punishment both traitors and those killed in battle of the enemy armies; and then drink his blood, convinced of being able to reach invincibility in this way. This figure inspired the Irishman Bram Stoker for his famous eternal love story "Dracula" (1897), as well as multiple literary and later film adaptations.
The Bloody Countess
We moved to the Late Middle Ages, at the end of the 16th century and the beginning of the 17th. In Hungary, Erzsébet Báthory, also known as the "Blood Countess", would go down in history for her devotion to red liquid and for what he was able to do with the pretext of always being beautiful.
When she reached adolescence, this woman of noble birth began to obsess with the idea of wanting to preserve her beauty forever. Therefore, he contacted sorcerers and sorceresses to see how he could achieve his wish. They started it in ceremonies in which they had to drink blood, preferably extracted from young girls and "virgins of soul", that is, they had not known love. Over time, his descent into the underworld was increasing, since, not content with killing to drink human blood, began to bathe in it: spent hours tucked in liters of this liquid, believing that it would keep his appearance young forever.
After years of disappearances of the locals who lived in the surrounding towns, the countess and her accomplices were discovered. The sorceresses and sorcerers who had helped her commit the crimes and who performed the bloody ceremonies cut off their fingers with a red-hot iron, then decapitated them and threw their bodies into a bonfire. The Countess was condemned to be walled in life in a cabin that had a small skylight high up where sunlight filtered through.
Despite the horribleness of the imposed penance and being fed once a day, the Countess endured four years walled and never showed signs of repentance for what she did. Did eating and bathing in blood have anything to do with delaying their agony for so long? Or, on the contrary, Would he have died of a disease (such as pneumonia) if he had not undergone such processes?
The vampire of Barcelona
During the early twentieth century, Barcelona, a city known worldwide as one of the main tourist attractions worldwide, witnessed one of the most terrible events permeating the Spanish black chronicle.The disappearance of several children in the district known as "El Raval" alerted the people living in this impoverished neighborhood.
The culprit was Enriqueta Martí, who would earn the nickname of "La vampira de Barcelona" or "La vampira del Raval", a woman of hermit life and obscure customs: they say that she was kidnapping children from humble families or who had been abandoned in the street to kill them, extract their blood and fats to use them as a base for cosmetic products, ointments and potions that later sold to high-ranking personalities with whom they rubbed elbows.
This woman had her home on the ground floor of a well known street in Barcelona and it was thanks to the good eye of a neighbor that her reign of terror could end. After kidnapping on February 10, 1912, a girl of just five years old; On the 27th of the same month, a neighbor who lived in front of the lair of 'La Vampira' was able to see one of the crystals by someone of small age and with a shaved head. At first he did not think it could be related to the disappearance of the little girl, but he was surprised to see her there, since for more than a year Enriqueta had lived alone in that place. After commenting with some of the shopkeepers and merchants, they decided to alert the police, who finally got a reliable clue about the mysterious case.
When the agents appeared in the place, they did not find any alarming sign that the woman dressed in ragged rags was the cause of so much confusion ... Until they found a room that the owner kept suspiciously under lock and key: there were several witchcraft books, bloody clothes of boys and girls, large quantities of human fat stored in glass jars, a large skinning knife and the bones of at least twelve boys and girls in a large sack.
As he confessed in police station, his way of proceeding was the following: dressed in tattered rags as if she were a beggar, lurked her victims and kidnapped them in the street . Once in his lair, he murdered them, drained their blood and their sebum. Then, at night, dressed in her best clothes, she went to the downtown areas of the city where wealthy people gathered and contacted them to trade their products, which were said to have both rejuvenating and healing properties. diseases of the time (for example, tuberculosis). He also admitted that there was a time when he had no luck in his abductions of children, so he chose to extract the fat from stray animals such as dogs and cats.
After her statement, she was sent to a women's prison, where she would try to take her own life twice, one of them trying to tear the veins off her wrist with bites. From that moment, she was under the supervision of three of the most dangerous and respected inmates in the center, to prevent other partners from harming her or to do it herself.
It is believed that his attempted suicide was to avoid giving in to pressure from the authorities to confess the names of the personalities for whom he worked, since it was always suspected that important families of the time could have been involved. Perhaps that explains the causes of his death, in 1913, when despite the supervision to which he was subjected, a group of inmates lynched her to end her life . The most suspicious have always considered the possibility that someone, from outside or inside a prison, would entrust their immediate execution. Unfortunately, the case was in the investigation phase, so it was not judged and the whole truth could not be known.
The Sack Man
Who has not heard of "El Hombre del Saco"? In Spanish folklore, formerly spoke of this character who, they say, wandered through the villages in search of those children who did not behave well, who got into the big sack that he carried with him and never saw them again.
While one might think that it is a simple invention that arose to terrorize the smallest and make them obey, the truth is that this legend has its origin in the so-called "sacamantecas" or "sacauntos" that, at the beginning of the 20th century, They murdered several children in different areas of the Spanish geography. At a time when hunger severely affected rural areas, many saw the opportunity to make money easily by killing and extracting the young children, and then sell them to the wealthy in the form of poultices or ointments.
Juan Díaz de Garayo, in Vitoria; or José González Tovar, in Málaga , are some examples that occupy two posts of dubious honor in the dark history of Spain and that, undoubtedly, we will deal with in future publications.
