Speaker 1: Monster House Presents.
Speaker 2: It's actually quite unlike anything we've ever seen before.
Speaker 1: A giant, hairy creature part eight parts.
Speaker 3: In Luckness, a twenty four mile long bottomless lake in
Speaker 3: the Highlands of Scotland. It's a creature known as the
Speaker 3: Luckness Monster. Monster Talk.
Speaker 1: Welcome to Monster Talk, the science show about monsters. I'm
Speaker 1: Blake Smith and I'm Karen Hey. There are Monster Talkers.
Speaker 1: We had a crazy busy October, but I hope our
Speaker 1: vampire content was a fun companion for these autumn days
Speaker 1: and nights. We talked about vampires all month long, from
Speaker 1: the pathology of Renfield Syndrome, to authentic folk tales to
Speaker 1: just chatting about them in pop culture terms. Well, we
Speaker 1: have one more bite to take out of this delicious
Speaker 1: blood red apple. We're welcoming back Professor Joe Laycock to
Speaker 1: talk about his research into people who partake in consensual
Speaker 1: vampirism and their culture, which lurks within a lot of
Speaker 1: other better known yet gothically shadowy communities. These are people
Speaker 1: who not only believe their vampires, but routinely drink blood
Speaker 1: from willing donors. It's a wide ranging discussion. There's some
Speaker 1: role playing games there's some satanic panic, and of course
Speaker 1: there's murder. But I think Joe's helped me contextualize some
Speaker 1: of the folks I've met along the way in my
Speaker 1: travels in Atlanta's nightclubs, gaming, horror, and music scene back
Speaker 1: in the day. We hope you enjoy this discussion and
Speaker 1: check out the show notes for links to Joe's books.
Speaker 3: Monster.
Speaker 1: Are are you ready to just get rolling?
Speaker 4: Sure? Yeah, okay, cool.
Speaker 1: I'm just gonna briefly say we're welcoming back. Joseph Flakecock
Speaker 1: and an assistant professor of religious studies at Texas State
Speaker 1: University who has written several books on new religious movements
Speaker 1: and a lot of topics that will be near and
Speaker 1: dear to Munster Talk listeners. And you're also the co
Speaker 1: editor of the journal Novo Religio. But we're bringing you
Speaker 1: on this time to be an expert about real life vampires.
Speaker 1: And you wrote a book I think it came out
Speaker 1: in two thousand and nine called Vampires Today, which also
Speaker 1: is like a great monthly magazine for the vampire.
Speaker 2: In your life, a newspaper.
Speaker 4: Welcome back to the Showger, Thanks always great to talk
Speaker 4: to you guys.
Speaker 1: So instead of having specific questions. We have a bunch
Speaker 1: of bullet points because this is a broad topic of
Speaker 1: which I think weirdly. I think Karen and I are
Speaker 1: informed about what happened, but we're pretty ignorant, and we're
Speaker 1: going to be a proxy for the possible ignorance of
Speaker 1: our audience. Just try to talk through this stuff to
Speaker 1: better understand about not vampires from movies, but people who
Speaker 1: sort of believe that they are vampires.
Speaker 2: Yeah, where do you want to start real vampires modern vampiism.
Speaker 3: When I think of real vampires, I think of people saying, oh, well,
Speaker 3: Dracula's based on blaod Tepis blood, the Impala or Elizabeth Bathrie.
Speaker 2: I think of that kind of thing. But that's not
Speaker 2: the kind.
Speaker 3: Of real vampires that you've written about and researched. So
Speaker 3: could you tell us a little bit about what modern
Speaker 3: vampiism or real vampires are?
Speaker 4: Sure, so I should be clear. You have psychiatric literature
Speaker 4: on people who are consuming human blood and are dangerous
Speaker 4: and basically have to be institutionalized. Richard Knowle as a psychiatrist,
Speaker 4: and he coined the term Renfield syndrome after the character
Speaker 4: from Dracula, to describe this condition. It's not in the DSM,
Speaker 4: but he's written about it. But when I looked at
Speaker 4: those cases, generally, the people who were actually like attacking
Speaker 4: people and consuming blood were so mentally ill that they
Speaker 4: didn't really even know why they were doing these things.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 4: They didn't say, oh, I did it because I'm a vampire.
Speaker 4: They would say, well, I don't have enough blood in
Speaker 4: my body or something like that. It would just be
Speaker 4: totally incoherent. It was the psychiatrist who saw that behavior
Speaker 4: and labeled it as vamporism. Right. So the people that
Speaker 4: I interviewed were not the criminally insane. Yeah, they were
Speaker 4: not committing crimes. But they did say that we're not
Speaker 4: like other people. That other people can just sort of
Speaker 4: you know, be healthy, but that our health deteriorates if
Speaker 4: we do not either consume actual human blood or sort
Speaker 4: of feed off of the psychic energy or life force
Speaker 4: of other people. And they said, they basically said, of
Speaker 4: vampire is a kind of shorthand to explain this condition
Speaker 4: that they believe.
Speaker 2: That they have.
Speaker 3: I just want to say, what immediately comes to mind
Speaker 3: is iron deficiency.
Speaker 2: How much does that play a part in this?
Speaker 4: Well, we don't know, right, you know, there have been
Speaker 4: analysis or medical interpretations of you know, iron deficiency, fibromyalgia,
Speaker 4: or or just it's psychosomatic.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 4: You don't actually need to drink human blood. This is
Speaker 4: just in your head, right. How I got involved in
Speaker 4: this research was when I was in Atlanta. There was
Speaker 4: a group there called the Atlanta Vampire Alliance, and the
Speaker 4: Atlanta Vampire Alliance really wanted to know, why are we
Speaker 4: like this, right? What is going on with us? Is it?
Speaker 4: You know, is this actually some kind of poorly understood
Speaker 4: medical condition. Is there actually something metaphysical happening here? Are
Speaker 4: we just insane? And so they organized this survey which
Speaker 4: you can go find online the results of their survey,
Speaker 4: But they surveyed about a thousand people who consider themselves
Speaker 4: to be a vampires as a very very long survey,
Speaker 4: but it asked all kinds of questions about medical history, religion,
Speaker 4: the type of books they read, the type of movies
Speaker 4: they watch, and so forth. And at the time, you know,
Speaker 4: I was going back to graduate school to get my PhD.
Speaker 4: Or I was thinking about doing it, and I thought,
Speaker 4: this is really interesting. You know, if you just wanted
Speaker 4: to pretend to be a vampire, this is a lot
Speaker 4: of work that these people are putting into this, right, Yes,
Speaker 4: this is a lot of a commitment. And I'm a
Speaker 4: religious studies person. All the literature from the perspective of
Speaker 4: religious studies was very, very bad and basically saying that
Speaker 4: vampirism is basically a satanic cult that hates Christianity and
Speaker 4: that murders people, and and there was an article in
Speaker 4: like the Encyclopedia of American Religious Cultures basically saying these things.
Speaker 4: And the person who wrote this article had never actually
Speaker 4: talked to a self identified vampire, which that's not fair.
Speaker 4: You can't write an Encyclopedia article about, you know, Baptists
Speaker 4: if you've never once been a Baptist. Yeah. Yeah, So
Speaker 4: so my plan at the time was I was going
Speaker 4: to the American Academy of Religion conference. That's a big
Speaker 4: national conference of about nine thousand religion scholars, because I
Speaker 4: was applying to grad school and I basically wanted to
Speaker 4: kind of press the flesh and give a face to
Speaker 4: associate with, you know, with anybody reading my application to
Speaker 4: grad school. But I didn't want to make it obvious
Speaker 4: that I was doing that. So I thought, I know,
Speaker 4: I'll present a paper, and then I'll say I'm here
Speaker 4: to present a paper, and and by the way, you know,
Speaker 4: you look for my application this this fall. And so
Speaker 4: I went to the vampires and I said, look, I
Speaker 4: want this to be a win win, right. I am
Speaker 4: trying to get a conference paper out of this that
Speaker 4: people will find interesting, but I want this to be
Speaker 4: a chance for you to kind of help maybe clear
Speaker 4: up some misconceptions about your community. And so they eventually,
Speaker 4: you know, kind of let me hang out with them
Speaker 4: and sort of learn what they were all about. And
Speaker 4: I gave the paper, and then afterwards I was approached
Speaker 4: by an acquisition editor from a publisher who said, can
Speaker 4: you make this into a book?
Speaker 1: Nice?
Speaker 4: And I was in my twenties, I had never written.
Speaker 4: It was the first book I ever wrote. But the
Speaker 4: editor knew something that I didn't know at the time,
Speaker 4: which was that Twilight was on the horizon.
Speaker 1: Ah, yeah, true.
Speaker 4: Blood was on the horizon. So this book came out
Speaker 4: in two thousand and nine and I had this bizarre
Speaker 4: fifteen minutes of fame when everybody wanted to talk to
Speaker 4: me about vampires. And at the height of it, MTV
Speaker 4: called me and asked if I would host a show
Speaker 4: where I went around the United States interviewing teenage vampires,
Speaker 4: and at the end, MTV went with this other show
Speaker 4: instead called Jersey Shore. There's an alternate timeline somewhere where
Speaker 4: I'm snooky.
Speaker 1: That's awesome. Yeah, that is so funny. But yeah, I
Speaker 1: told you guys offline that. You know, I lived in
Speaker 1: the Metro Atlanta area in the nineties, so I remember
Speaker 1: when Vampire the Masquerade game had blown up, and it
Speaker 1: kind of overlapped with a bridjoining goth culture. There was
Speaker 1: a club here called the Masquerade, and there were lots
Speaker 1: of people who were sort of LARPing Vampire and not
Speaker 1: just playing it like a It was quite different from
Speaker 1: Dungeons and Dragons, and I wondered how much these self
Speaker 1: identifying vampires overlapped with the people who played the game.
Speaker 1: Is that two circles that don't touch? Are is there
Speaker 1: an overlap or is it a circle in a circle
Speaker 1: or where did you kind of sort of find that?
Speaker 4: Yeah, No, there's there's huge overlap. So you know, Vampire
Speaker 4: the Mass Grade is an amazing game. You know, I
Speaker 4: played that game back in the nineties. But they created
Speaker 4: an entire sort of alternate world where it's it's our world.
Speaker 4: You know, human history as we know it existed, but
Speaker 4: there were vampires and werewolves the whole time, you know,
Speaker 4: behind the scenes, changing things, and so the it's really
Speaker 4: easy to get kind of enthralled in this. And they
Speaker 4: made all these endless details about different clams of vampires
Speaker 4: and their society and their rules and and so forth,
Speaker 4: right to the point where people would go on like
Speaker 4: AOL chat rooms where people were talking about this game
Speaker 4: and not understand that it was a game. Yes, right,
Speaker 4: because because it seems so real, it was so detail oriented, right,
Speaker 4: and then it was a really fun game to play.
Speaker 4: And some of the vampires that I interviewed, particularly in
Speaker 4: the New York scene, the New York scene was very
Speaker 4: focused on kind of the club the club culture. Oh yeah,
Speaker 4: the goth This was the if you've ever seen the
Speaker 4: movie A Party Monster, right, this was the era when
Speaker 4: when when that was happening in New York. And they said, well, look,
Speaker 4: this was a fun game. Why can't we do this
Speaker 4: all the time?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 4: Why why why do I only have to be a
Speaker 4: vampire lord? You know on Saturday night? I want to
Speaker 4: do this twenty four or seven. So so at least
Speaker 4: one person actually admitted that Michelle Belonge, who has appeared
Speaker 4: on a Paranormal State and things like that, as sort
Speaker 4: of an intellectual leader for this community, and she's written
Speaker 4: some of the best history about it from an insider perspective,
Speaker 4: and she said, yeah, we would. We would play Vampire
Speaker 4: the Masquerade, and then you know, after the game was
Speaker 4: over around two in the morning, if somebody was wearing,
Speaker 4: say a whole lot of occult jewelry or you know,
Speaker 4: suggested that they were into kind of a cult or
Speaker 4: metaphysical things, then I would I would. I would chat
Speaker 4: them up and say, you know, do you what do
Speaker 4: you think about the idea of some people are actually vampires.
Speaker 4: So I don't think that the real vampire community would
Speaker 4: have ever gotten to the size that it did if
Speaker 4: it weren't for that game.
Speaker 1: She's interesting. She self identifies as a psychic vampire, and
Speaker 1: she's on social media. It's interesting. When I first saw
Speaker 1: her on Paranormal State, I didn't like the way they
Speaker 1: presented her like she as a skeptical person. It annoyed me.
Speaker 1: But interacting with her own social media, it turns out
Speaker 1: we have a lot in common, and I've had some
Speaker 1: very pleasant exchanges. So she probably doesn't remember me, but
Speaker 1: I've had some very nice conversations with her.
Speaker 4: Yeah, she used to have a podcast called Shadow Dance,
Speaker 4: and I think she's very well read and very well
Speaker 4: spoken and very smart. But she has these subjective experiences involving,
Speaker 4: you know, energy and sort of feeding on on subtle energy. Right,
Speaker 4: And as a religion scholar, I just have to listen
Speaker 4: to people describe their experiences. What am I going to say?
Speaker 4: You know you yeah, you didn't experience that?
Speaker 1: Right now, it would end the conversation.
Speaker 3: Speaking of that, mentioning the Atlanta Vampire Alliance and spending
Speaker 3: time with them, can you tell us a little bit
Speaker 3: about what you learned from these people? And how big
Speaker 3: these numbers are, I mean, how many people are getting
Speaker 3: into this?
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean we don't really have good numbers. They
Speaker 4: were able to get a thousand people to fill out
Speaker 4: this survey, but not all of those people strictly identified
Speaker 4: as vampires. Some of them may have defined themselves as
Speaker 4: an energy worker or something like that. And you know,
Speaker 4: we never we never really know. Is this just a joke?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 4: If somebody filled the survey where they were they serious
Speaker 4: about it? And also there is a great deal of
Speaker 4: paranoia in this community, and some of it is justified.
Speaker 4: I met vampires living in the Bible Belts who were
Speaker 4: basically outed as vampires and you know, would be fired
Speaker 4: from their job or kicked out of their church or
Speaker 4: whatever for this. So when you have that kind of
Speaker 4: paranoia and somebody on the Internet says, hey, put all
Speaker 4: your information in this survey, you know, there really were
Speaker 4: rumors within the community that the Atlanta Vampire Alliance was like,
Speaker 4: you know, the Men in Black or something, and they
Speaker 4: were here to round up all the vampires and put
Speaker 4: them in interment camps or something like that.
Speaker 2: So we don't know.
Speaker 4: The numbers that I've heard is you know, several thousand,
Speaker 4: and those are just guesses from people like Michelle Belanje.
Speaker 4: So it's hard to tell. And there are people who
Speaker 4: you know, kind of phase out of this right that
Speaker 4: after a while they're like, oh, you know, maybe I'm
Speaker 4: not really a vampire. So it can be hard to tell.
Speaker 1: It does remind me a little bit of my experiences
Speaker 1: with the SCA Society for the Creative Anachronism, So where
Speaker 1: you have people who do it on the weekend, you know,
Speaker 1: and that's what they do and that's all, and you
Speaker 1: have people who live it every day. And my experience
Speaker 1: playing Vampire the role playing game reminds me a little
Speaker 1: bit of have you ever been to like those? Like
Speaker 1: I've never been to Williamsburg with that kind of a
Speaker 1: place where people are doing a reenactment and they will
Speaker 1: not break character, and it's like really frustrating. I've had
Speaker 1: some vampire experiences like that where it's like, I know,
Speaker 1: you're not a blood drinking vampire, but you're also not
Speaker 1: this person that you're pretending to be and that's really
Speaker 1: hard to have a conversation.
Speaker 4: So, you know, Michelle Balajay talks about what she calls
Speaker 4: womb communities, right, so one of them is the Vampire Larp,
Speaker 4: but another actually is things like renfares. You know, this
Speaker 4: figure in New York named Father Sebastian is what's called
Speaker 4: a fang smith. So he has some training and dentistry
Speaker 4: and he'll make you these very nice, realistic things. Yeah,
Speaker 4: I mean I think he has trained as like a
Speaker 4: dental assistant or something like that. I'm not really sure,
Speaker 4: but he makes good fangs. But he started what's that are?
Speaker 2: Are they like veneres or like caps or can you
Speaker 2: take them off?
Speaker 4: You can take them out, and they even I think
Speaker 4: they have different styles. Like if you want kind of
Speaker 4: say the Lost Boys fangs versus the you know, dust
Speaker 4: till Dawn fangs or something. There are people who get
Speaker 4: permanent fangs made out of usually porcelain or something. And
Speaker 4: my understanding is if you do that, you have to
Speaker 4: kind of learn how to eat and drink and talk.
Speaker 2: Usually it's the reverse, and you're getting caps to cover
Speaker 2: that kind of thing.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 4: But Father Sebastian talked about getting started in all of
Speaker 4: this at the Tuxedo Renaissance Festival in New York. And
Speaker 4: one term used within the vampire community to talk about
Speaker 4: normal people people like me is mundanes. And that's a
Speaker 4: term that comes from rent fairs, right, That's what you
Speaker 4: call the guy at the rend fairs just wearing jeans
Speaker 4: and a T shirt.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we would frequently go to the mall, you know,
Speaker 1: to get some food in our sca garb and call
Speaker 1: it freaking the mundanes. Absolutely, that's all over that.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I imagine that's probably true for furries too, but I
Speaker 1: don't know that for a fact.
Speaker 2: But sure, yeah, oh.
Speaker 1: No, I have a line. I have a line. So
Speaker 1: let's talk about that psychic versus sanguinarian. What is that
Speaker 1: the main split within that group? And is it a
Speaker 1: split I mean, or is it how do they get along?
Speaker 1: You know that sort of thing.
Speaker 4: Yeah. So, you know, drinking blood is kind of the
Speaker 4: sun quanan of being a vampire, and so the so
Speaker 4: called sanguinary and vampires, first of all, I should be clear,
Speaker 4: they're not drinking very much blood, right right, So they're
Speaker 4: finding they're finding a donor. And you know, it's only
Speaker 4: after I've finished this research that I realized the donors
Speaker 4: are kind of weirder than the vampires.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Its because because the vampires at least are like, I
Speaker 4: need this to be healthy, but the donors are like,
Speaker 4: you know, I'm just gonna find someone to cut me
Speaker 4: and drink some of my blood. And and for at
Speaker 4: least some donors I met, this was a sexual thing,
Speaker 4: you know, they got sexual gratification from it. But for
Speaker 4: others they just sort of felt, I don't know that
Speaker 4: this was a chance to be compassionate towards somebody. So
Speaker 4: so a lot of the discourse within the segmentariums is, well,
Speaker 4: if you're going to drink human blood, it's never a
Speaker 4: healthy thing to do. So what can you do to
Speaker 4: kind of reduce the risk, you know, getting like an
Speaker 4: STD test for your donor helps, but STED tests are
Speaker 4: meant to measure sexually transmitted diseases, not diseases from drinking blood.
Speaker 4: There's a lot of discussion about what is the part
Speaker 4: of the body that will be the least painful and
Speaker 4: leave the less scarring, and a lot of them said, well,
Speaker 4: kind of the back, kind of between the shoulder blades
Speaker 4: is actually very good for that. Some of them use
Speaker 4: lancets used by diabetics to test their blood sugar to
Speaker 4: extract a few drops of blood. And then you have
Speaker 4: the psychic vampires. And the idea of psychic vampirism really
Speaker 4: in Western culture comes out of nineteenth century occultism. Right.
Speaker 4: It's almost an old joke Hunger Show Blake, But everything
Speaker 4: goes back to theosophy. The theosophists said, well, vampires are real,
Speaker 4: they're just not what you think. You know, vampires are,
Speaker 4: you know, either corpses that are sort of astrally projecting
Speaker 4: and sucking up your life force, or they're sort of
Speaker 4: disembodied kind of ghosts. That feed on energy and so forth,
Speaker 4: and they said, some people are you know, they're sort
Speaker 4: of psychic sponges and they just feed on the life
Speaker 4: force of everybody around them. And the occult literature was basically,
Speaker 4: these people are really bad. You need to avoid them,
Speaker 4: and here are some rituals and things that you can
Speaker 4: use to protect yourself from them. And Michelle balannge describe
Speaker 4: growing up, you know, being an occult nick teenager and
Speaker 4: reading about this and thinking, oh, my gosh, I think
Speaker 4: they're talking about me. I think I'm one of these
Speaker 4: psychic sponges that they're talking about. So the psychic vampires
Speaker 4: have said, well, you know, we're not just parasites, we're
Speaker 4: kind of energy manipulators, and so we could sort of
Speaker 4: feed on people's life for us in a way that's unethical.
Speaker 4: And Michelle Balange talks about, you know, I'm on a
Speaker 4: plane and there's a crying baby, and I could you know,
Speaker 4: suck enough energy out of that baby so we would
Speaker 4: go to sleep. She said she thinks she could do
Speaker 4: that at one point, but instead I could go to
Speaker 4: like a concert where everybody's already in kind of a
Speaker 4: high energy state, and I can siphon off some of
Speaker 4: their energy and maybe even kind of almost like sculpt
Speaker 4: the crowd's energy in a way that they have like
Speaker 4: a better time at the at the concert.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 4: And I talked to people from Asia about this, and
Speaker 4: and they're like, of course people suck your energy. Of
Speaker 4: course there's people like that. Well, why are you calling
Speaker 4: them vampires? That's very dramatic.
Speaker 1: I mean, I don't know about you, but I've dated
Speaker 1: a few people who snapped my energy really badly. You know,
Speaker 1: it's not just a metaphor, right.
Speaker 4: Anton LaVey had this whole thing about you know, no
Speaker 4: no mercy for psychic vampires. Right. But in Asia, where
Speaker 4: there are more established ideas of things like chi energy
Speaker 4: or prana, it's it's much more normal to just say, oh, yeah,
Speaker 4: you know, I I got my my prana drained because
Speaker 4: I was hanging around the wrong people. Today, it's not
Speaker 4: seen as this kind of mystical occult a secret so
Speaker 4: on the on the Internet, which is really where the
Speaker 4: vampire community kind of took its form as it exists today,
Speaker 4: you initially had some sparring between people saying, well, you know,
Speaker 4: real vampires drink blood, You guys don't drink blood. You're
Speaker 4: just sort of, you know, just whatever. And then the
Speaker 4: psychic vampire is saying, well, no, actually, you know, you
Speaker 4: still require this physical medium to get life for us,
Speaker 4: but we are more evolved than you and we can
Speaker 4: just sort of siphon it off. And I think eventually
Speaker 4: they decided that, you know, it was better for them
Speaker 4: to hang together they would hang separately. And there are
Speaker 4: also vampires who say that they're hybrids and they can
Speaker 4: kind of use either feeding modality. So those are the
Speaker 4: main types. And there are also some people who say, well,
Speaker 4: I'm a vampire and I feed tantrically, you know, I
Speaker 4: feed on sexual energy, with erotic encounters with with partners,
Speaker 4: or even vampires who say I'm I feed on you know,
Speaker 4: electricity or thunderstorms or you know, elements like like like this.
Speaker 4: So it can kind of go a lot of places.
Speaker 4: But basically the versus sanguinary and those are the main types.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 3: The psychic vampires makes me think of what we do
Speaker 3: in the Shadows and the character Colin Robinson.
Speaker 2: I don't think Blake has seen it yet.
Speaker 4: Yeah, Colin Robbinson is a perfect example, right of this
Speaker 4: idea of psychic and sanguinary and vampires. This was also
Speaker 4: referenced on South Park. South Park did an episode that
Speaker 4: self identified vampires and this discourse of psychic versus sanguinaria
Speaker 4: and comes up on the show.
Speaker 3: I wanted to ask you, Joe, with you talking about
Speaker 3: those that drink blood and have donors, how do they
Speaker 3: extract the blood?
Speaker 4: Right? Well, they learned really fast that the worst possible
Speaker 4: way to extract blood from a human being is to
Speaker 4: bite them. That is the most painful, inefficient, unsanitary thing
Speaker 4: you could possibly do. So what's more common is either
Speaker 4: just kind of you know, nicking them like I said,
Speaker 4: between the shoulder blades so that just a little bit
Speaker 4: of blood comes out, or using uh, you know, like
Speaker 4: a test test test needles that you can get at
Speaker 4: the store for for for testing diabetes. I've heard of
Speaker 4: other techniques out there, like one person on a forum
Speaker 4: was a veterinarian and had some kind of special sort
Speaker 4: of triangular shaped needles from from doing veterinarian work. I've
Speaker 4: also seen discussions of well, if you're gonna put your
Speaker 4: mouth on your donor, you know, take a good hit
Speaker 4: of mouthwash first, Yeah, help reduce the chance of infection.
Speaker 1: This is the sort of thing that may could only
Speaker 1: have come together after the Internet. I don't know how
Speaker 1: a community like this could have sort of met easily
Speaker 1: and quietly before that, But there are sort of precursors here,
Speaker 1: I think. And I'm curious as to how much you
Speaker 1: think pop culture influences these communities, because it seems to
Speaker 1: influence a lot of other monsters in ways we never
Speaker 1: would have thought of when we first started doing the show.
Speaker 4: Yeah. I mean it's very difficult trying to learn the
Speaker 4: history of this before the Internet, because everybody in the
Speaker 4: vampire subculture there's a real demand to be an elder.
Speaker 4: Elder is a term that comes from the LARP, right, Yeah,
Speaker 4: and to kind of set yourself up as knowing secrets
Speaker 4: and sort of being more important and having a deeper
Speaker 4: or more interesting history than the real history. So sometimes
Speaker 4: I would interview someone and then another vampire would say
Speaker 4: that guy's a total liar. Don't listen anything that he said, right,
Speaker 4: all it's all made up. Some of the more reliable
Speaker 4: things I could find, though, is that one kind of
Speaker 4: very early place where this kind of commune conform is
Speaker 4: in horror fandom. Yeah, and particularly the show Dark Shadow
Speaker 4: So Dark Shadows was a soap opera in the sixties,
Speaker 4: and originally it was just going to be a kind
Speaker 4: of gothic soap opera set in Collinsport, Maine, and they
Speaker 4: got terrible ratings and the show was going to be canceled,
Speaker 4: and so they just said, well, screw it, let's have
Speaker 4: a vampire.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 4: So you had a show on, you know, a network
Speaker 4: daytime television with a vampire and people love the vampire.
Speaker 4: The vampire saved the show. And then they were like, well, great,
Speaker 4: but we can't kill the stupid vampire now because that's
Speaker 4: the only reason people are watching. So maybe he's not
Speaker 4: an evil vampire. Maybe he's a reluctant vampire and he
Speaker 4: actually wants to be human again, and that made it
Speaker 4: even better. Yeah, and Anne Rice was watching Dark Shadows
Speaker 4: was a influence on Interview with a Vampire, where you
Speaker 4: have this reluctant, sympathetic a vampire character. So Dark Shadows
Speaker 4: had a huge following and there would be just like today,
Speaker 4: there would be conventions in hotels and I found multiple
Speaker 4: sources describing a woman who went to a Dark Shadows
Speaker 4: convention in the seventies and said, I'm a real vampire
Speaker 4: and if you want to get bit, here's my room number.
Speaker 4: And then they're just being the line of people down
Speaker 4: the hall waiting for their turn to go in there
Speaker 4: and get bits. So that's all from the pre internet era.
Speaker 1: Wow, just for listeners. The Dark Shadows was a Dan
Speaker 1: Curtis show who went on to make coul Check The
Speaker 1: Nightstalker so and a lot of other cool horror shows.
Speaker 1: So I guess he really leaned into that vampire stuff
Speaker 1: after that.
Speaker 4: Yeah, well, you know, Kojak The Nightstalker was a great show.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 4: And then and then of course there was the kind
Speaker 4: of forgettable remake with Johnny Depp, but it was a
Speaker 4: character that, yeah, that's what I always wanted to play,
Speaker 4: Barnabas Collins, the Vampire.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, okay. I saw they also did a make
Speaker 1: of the culturec show and I thought that wasn't Junny Depp,
Speaker 1: but that's okay, Yeah, yeah, you're right. The movie yeah,
Speaker 1: and they made it into a comedy instead of you know,
Speaker 1: Barnabas Collins I think was played by what Jonathan fred
Speaker 1: and just did a great performance. And later on in
Speaker 1: life he went around and did these talking tours where
Speaker 1: I think he did pose stories and that sort of
Speaker 1: gothic thing, and I liked him a lot, so yeah,
Speaker 1: sorry to see his past.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it was a surprisingly good show considering they had
Speaker 4: to put it out an episode like every single day.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm wondering if there are other people listening to
Speaker 3: this and thinking what I'm thinking, and that is only
Speaker 3: in America. But this kind of thing happened, So, Joe,
Speaker 3: is this kind of thing happening in other parts of
Speaker 3: the Western world. Is it happening in Australia, in the
Speaker 3: UK or other cultures non Western cultures.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's definitely happening in other cultures. I even got
Speaker 4: an email not too long ago from somebody saying, you know, hey,
Speaker 4: I'm in the UK and I'm a vampire. Can you
Speaker 4: help me meet other vampires? My understanding is, you know,
Speaker 4: American vampires are a little bit more media friendly and flamboyance,
Speaker 4: and the UK vampire is a bit more shy and
Speaker 4: easily embarrassed about being outed as a vampire. The Atlanta
Speaker 4: Vampire Alliances survey was translated into I think five different languages.
Speaker 4: There appeared to be actually a sizable community in Russia,
Speaker 4: and then you know, they just ask people what country
Speaker 4: are you in? And again we don't know if they're
Speaker 4: being honest, but the countries that were reported, there was
Speaker 4: a significant group in Japan, which is not so surprising.
Speaker 4: Japan's very into Gothic culture and vampires, and even places
Speaker 4: in the Middle East and in Muslim majority countries where
Speaker 4: you wouldn't really expect to find vampire culture being as popular.
Speaker 4: So I think it's actually fairly widespread. I've also gotten
Speaker 4: emails from people in South America as telling me that
Speaker 4: who want me to know that their vampires and they're
Speaker 4: in South America.
Speaker 2: Wow, interesting.
Speaker 1: Global phenom, the universal So I remember a very big
Speaker 1: news story about a vampire murder, and I know you're
Speaker 1: informed about that as well. So that was the Rod
Speaker 1: Is it Pharrell?
Speaker 4: I think it's feral?
Speaker 1: Is it feral Rod Ferrell murder? And how that sort
Speaker 1: of ties into this? But I hope what I hope
Speaker 1: is the tail end of the pict But does it
Speaker 1: feel like it's quite gone? But yeah, can you talk
Speaker 1: about that case a little bit?
Speaker 4: Yeah, So Rod Ferrell was sixteen and actually we were
Speaker 4: born the same year, So I think a lot about
Speaker 4: Rod Ferrell's life sometimes because in some ways we were
Speaker 4: very similar. We had similar interests and stuff, but I had,
Speaker 4: you know, a family, Yeah, yeah, and I really really
Speaker 4: did not. You know, his his mother had been, you know,
Speaker 4: basically a sex worker and seemed to have basically the
Speaker 4: mindset of a child, not an adult. And he was
Speaker 4: on a lot of drugs too, which which didn't help.
Speaker 4: But he was very charismatic and imaginative, and he had
Speaker 4: this kind of coterie of friends and he said, you know,
Speaker 4: we're we're a vampire clan, and he was drawing heavily
Speaker 4: on Vampire the Masquarade. My understanding is he only actually
Speaker 4: played Vampire the mass Garade once and he was asked
Speaker 4: not to come back because he was on drugs. So
Speaker 4: so it was not the case of, you know, he
Speaker 4: just played the game too much and lost touch with reality.
Speaker 4: That's not something that that happens in real life, right.
Speaker 2: But he was.
Speaker 4: He was troubled, and his mother was actually being charged
Speaker 4: with basically the corruption of a minor, you know, giving
Speaker 4: a really kind of saucy sort of love letter to
Speaker 4: I think one of his younger peers or something like that.
Speaker 4: And so he decides, he gets his vampire clients, is
Speaker 4: let's leave town. I have an old girlfriend in Eustas, Florida,
Speaker 4: and she's saying, you know, my parents are being really
Speaker 4: mean to me. I wish somebody would just kill them.
Speaker 4: So they steal a car and they head down to
Speaker 4: Eustace and Rod Ferrell goes into the house. On his way,
Speaker 4: he get interest through the garage. He picks up a
Speaker 4: crowbar and he ends up beating this girl's parents to death.
Speaker 4: She doesn't know. She's outside waiting to sort of meet
Speaker 4: the other teenagers. So when Rod Ferrell comes back in
Speaker 4: the car and says, I killed your parents, she doesn't
Speaker 4: believe him because he says weird stuff all the time.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Right, And they drive to New Orleans and it gradually
Speaker 4: dawns on her he wasn't kidding. He really killed my parents.
Speaker 4: And then he ends up basically turning himself in and
Speaker 4: so he has a good chance of sort of being
Speaker 4: in prison for the longest of any time ever, right,
Speaker 4: because he basically got a life sentence at the age
Speaker 4: of sixteen. He was going to get the death penalty.
Speaker 4: I don't think he's still on death row, but he's
Speaker 4: definitely still in prison. So when this happened, the sort
Speaker 4: of satanic Panic, Dungeons and Dragons. Panic immediately swooped in, right,
Speaker 4: and they said, this game makes people kill parents, right,
Speaker 4: that this game is making teenagers kill people. There was
Speaker 4: a guy named Don Raymer who was basically a Satanic
Speaker 4: cult cop right saying, you know, he literally said if
Speaker 4: your daughter reads Twilight, she'll murder you in your sleep.
Speaker 4: Before he died, so he comes and exploits this college
Speaker 4: campuses all over America start banning vampire the Masquerade. And
Speaker 4: what this did to the vampire community is it split
Speaker 4: this kind of easy relationship between the gamers and the
Speaker 4: so called real vampires because the gamers wanted to be
Speaker 4: crystal clear vampires don't exist, and if you say you're
Speaker 4: a vampire, we think you're crazy, and the vampires wanted
Speaker 4: to be really clear that well, we're not just crazy gamers.
Speaker 4: It wasn't like we played one game of Masquerade too many.
Speaker 4: This is really kind of who we are, and this
Speaker 4: is really how we've made sense of our life and
Speaker 4: our experience. And the reality was these two communities had
Speaker 4: quite a lot in common, but Rod Ferrell kind of
Speaker 4: forced them to deny that connection existed.
Speaker 2: So tragic story.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it is a tragic story. And as after I've
Speaker 4: written my book, I mean, at some point I need
Speaker 4: to kind of revisit the vampire subculture and update the
Speaker 4: book because I'm not twenty seven anymore and I have
Speaker 4: more insight into things. Yeah, but with Rod Ferrell, you know,
Speaker 4: people were saying, well, was he mentally ill or was
Speaker 4: he this is a sacrifice to the devil or whatever.
Speaker 4: I don't think he had any plan whatsoever when he
Speaker 4: went into that house except to maybe get some some
Speaker 4: things he could sell to kind of stay on the run.
Speaker 4: But I read a book by a Japanese sociologist named
Speaker 4: A Kuyasato about the the Bozo Zoku, who are these
Speaker 4: sort of you know, criminal biker teams in Japan, And
Speaker 4: he found that these were all all from pretty good homes,
Speaker 4: pretty affluent homes. But he describes this as being a
Speaker 4: sort of corrupted play where they're sort of playing the
Speaker 4: role of being a dangerous biker until they actually, you know,
Speaker 4: actually commit a crime, and then it's no longer funny anymore.
Speaker 4: Now you actually are a criminal biker. And I think
Speaker 4: something similar happened with Rod Ferrell, where he sort of
Speaker 4: was kind of playing a game with his friends of
Speaker 4: being this dangerous vampire cult leader figure until he actually
Speaker 4: killed someone. And now you can't quit playing the game
Speaker 4: right now. Now it's not a role playing game. Now,
Speaker 4: that's just your role in society.
Speaker 1: I got that very impression when I saw him on
Speaker 1: interviews back in the day, and it was very I
Speaker 1: don't usually sit around thinking I have some degree of
Speaker 1: sympathy for this kill, but I just felt like somebody
Speaker 1: along the way could have pulled him back. Maybe that's
Speaker 1: not true, but it feels like that, you know, So
Speaker 1: it's unfortunate.
Speaker 4: Well, and I did a show for MSNBC where they
Speaker 4: interviewed him in prison, and we did this very silly
Speaker 4: thing where they put me in an office and they
Speaker 4: blacked out all the windows and turn out all the
Speaker 4: lights and made me watch the interview of him in prison,
Speaker 4: and he tries to play the Satanic panic card. So
Speaker 4: he says, yes, I killed these people, but it's not
Speaker 4: my fault because I was raising a Satanic cult and
Speaker 4: I witnessed human sacrifices as a child, so I never
Speaker 4: had a chance to be normal. And MSNBC is eating
Speaker 4: this up, and they're saying he's never told anybody about
Speaker 4: this before.
Speaker 1: This is a scoop.
Speaker 4: Yeah, right, And I said, look, I convinced a bunch
Speaker 4: of teenagers who was a four hundred year old vampire,
Speaker 4: and now he's convinced you that he saw human sacrifice. Yeah,
Speaker 4: it's all nonsense, and you guys should know better. And
Speaker 4: they said, well, what do you mean? And I said,
Speaker 4: I mean the Satanic panic? And they said, what's the
Speaker 4: Satanic panic? What are you talking about? Wow, journalism that
Speaker 4: any of this had ever happened.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it goes to show there are a lot of
Speaker 3: people out there who just aren't familiar with it, and
Speaker 3: they hear these stories and keep repeating them as truth.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 4: And they weren't going to let it go. It was
Speaker 4: too good to let go. So I tried to kind of,
Speaker 4: you know, as just a graduate student, try to kind
Speaker 4: of explain that the Satanic Satanic panic was a panic,
Speaker 4: and they edited down to me saying basically like, but
Speaker 4: you know, we don't really have any evidence for any of.
Speaker 1: This, right, Christ, Oh, at least you tried. Oh my god,
Speaker 1: did the right thing. Yeah. Wow, Well that's that's a
Speaker 1: sad note. But we're out of time. Are you working
Speaker 1: on anything fun right now?
Speaker 4: I'm currently working on Lizard People. I'm currently trying to
Speaker 4: convince an agent for one of the big publishers that
Speaker 4: they should let me write a book on the history
Speaker 4: of you know, shape shifting reptilians, from Roberty Howard to
Speaker 4: this guy in Nashville blowing up an AT and T Center. Yeah,
Speaker 4: because it's a very interesting history and as far as
Speaker 4: I can tell, nobody really knows it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, is certainly, I mean, it's certainly not widely known.
Speaker 1: If we did an episode just on the Shaver mystery,
Speaker 1: and oh my god, it was so hard to pull
Speaker 1: from so many sources because it's there's just not a
Speaker 1: go to, you know, there's not a single volume that
Speaker 1: kind of collects everything well.
Speaker 4: And I've discovered a straight line between people who knew
Speaker 4: Shaver personally and then people who began saying things like
Speaker 4: there's an underground military base in Dulce, New Mexico full
Speaker 4: of reptilians. So I've started to make my own kind
Speaker 4: of conspiracy web putting all these players together. It's driving
Speaker 4: Natasha crazy.
Speaker 1: But you know, there are I mean, there a lot
Speaker 1: of connections. Uh, there are a lot, And I don't
Speaker 1: think of it as necessarily a conspiracy theory, but you know,
Speaker 1: it's it's a little bit like the Lovecraftian Circle of Letters,
Speaker 1: where people keep contributing to the lore and then you
Speaker 1: get this mythos developed. It's pretty crazy, but it's.
Speaker 4: Literally the Lovecraftian circle of Letters. It's literally Lovecraft and
Speaker 4: other wheel weird tale authors saying, Oh, serpent people, that's cool,
Speaker 4: I'll help story.
Speaker 2: I look forward to this book, and I'm sure it's
Speaker 2: going to happen.
Speaker 1: Yes, gotta, it's gotta. So let us know if we
Speaker 1: need to do, go fund me or whatever. All right, Joe,
Speaker 1: thanks a lot for talking with us again.
Speaker 2: Say hey, Atasha and uh yeah, always great to talk
Speaker 2: to you.
Speaker 1: We will talk to you again later.
Speaker 4: Happy Halloween, fantastic.
Speaker 2: Yeah Halloween's well.
Speaker 1: Yeah, mobs, you've been listening to Monster Talk, the science
Speaker 1: show about monsters. I'm Blake Smith and I'm Karen Stolzner.
Speaker 1: You just heard an interview with Professor Joseph Lacock discussing
Speaker 1: the world of real vampires. Check the show notes for
Speaker 1: lots of reading from his deep and thoughtful examinations of
Speaker 1: fringe and weird beliefs. We hope you enjoyed this episode
Speaker 1: of monster Talk. Our goal here is to bring you
Speaker 1: the best in monster related content with a focus on
Speaker 1: scientific skepticism and critical thinking. If you enjoy our show
Speaker 1: and want to support our mission, start out by visiting
Speaker 1: monster talk dot org forward slash support. That's monster talk
Speaker 1: dot org forward slash Support. There you'll find links to
Speaker 1: our Patreon page, as well as a donate button if
Speaker 1: you'd like to just make a one time contribution. A
Speaker 1: great way to support the show is to buy books
Speaker 1: from our Amazon wish list. These are books that directly
Speaker 1: help with our monster research. We love used books very much,
Speaker 1: so don't feel compelled to buy new ones, and we're
Speaker 1: also very fond of kindle edihes because of their easily
Speaker 1: searched content and without spending any money at all. You
Speaker 1: can support and raise the profile of the show by
Speaker 1: leaving a positive review at iTunes or wherever you get
Speaker 1: your podcasts. Positive reviews help keep us visible in iTunes,
Speaker 1: which is a great way to help us find you listeners. Finally,
Speaker 1: remember to share episodes you really like with your friends
Speaker 1: and family. You can help make Monster Talk the nightlight
Speaker 1: that keeps monsters away from someone you love. Monster Talk
Speaker 1: theme music is by Peach stealing monkeys. Stay tuned. We
Speaker 1: have more coming soon, including Griffin's new Monster Festivals and
Speaker 1: a look at the Talking Mongos movie. We'll crawl back
Speaker 1: into your ears next time. This has been a Monster
Speaker 1: House presentation.