Folklore of the Night

         While the Vampire has a particular association with Eastern Europe, the Werewolf has often been the great menace of Northern and Western Europe.  Some have speculated that the werewolf has its origins in Nordic mythology, where the Gods transform into wolves and bears.  There are even links to witchcraft and occasionally vampirism, where both creatures can take the form of wolves.  It is interesting to note that descriptions of vampires do not always differ much from those of werewolves.  Both creatures have fangs, claws, and eyebrows that meet in the middle.  Werewolves are unique in that the ring finger is as long or maybe even longer than the middle finger.  While there are a few methods for identifying werewolves in their human form, the most common was based on the belief that the hair of a werewolf only retracts within the skin.  A painful but straightforward peeling of the suspect's skin back to reveal any hai...

      The belief that death can transform a cherished loved one into a malicious spirit can be traced to primitive societies.  The beloved dead become spiteful and jealous of the living.  Many of the traditions found in funeral rites were not only intended to help speed the deceased on to the next life, but also to prevent the dead from returning to the living.  There has been some debate among scholars regarding the human psychology that would lead humans to fear the dead.  Some studies focus on the fact that, for most people, death is the most significant "unknown," and, as H.P. Lovecraft put it, "the oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown."  Others have speculated that we might fear the dead for the apparent reason that a dead body is not having much fun, may even be in pain, or is resentful of being forgotten.      Traditional tombstones may have be...

  Adolf Hitler was known to have had a lifetime fascination with Germanic folklore.  Anything that glorified the "Aryan" race was useful to promote his particularly racist version of Fascism.  In his speeches and propaganda, he frequently associated his people with the image of the werewolf.  He saw this as a positive thing, possibly using his own distorted understanding of Friedrich Nietzche's concept of "supermen."  Instead of the destructive image of the werewolf that we are familiar with, he pushed the image of a being that has great internal strength and the will to carry out violent actions if necessary for a greater end.      In the closing years of the Second World War, the Nazis began to promote the idea of an elite military force of Germans, known as the Werewolves, that would infiltrate behind allied lines as a resistance force.  Later there was some effort to convert these Werewolves into an underground movement that w...

The Rocky Mountain Vampire:     There has never been and probably will never be a movie about the classic Rocky Mountain Vampire.  The only plausible way to pull it off would be to make it a comedy.  According to some of the old Shoshone legends, and those of other tribes of the Northwest, the indigenous blood drinker approaches its victim with stealth, then inserts its nose into the victim's ear and inhales the blood through its own nose.  There are no reports on just how pointed the vampire's nose might be, or whether the whole process is only possible through the creature's sheer vacuum power.