Do Vampires Exist?

by Raj
(India)

Question:
Do vampires really exist? If so, where are they? How would I find one?

Answer:
I answered a similar question a while back in the Q&A titled Where Can I Find a Real Vampire? That may still be the best answer I can give, but I continue to get this question, so maybe it needs a little more explanation.

Do vampires really exist? I can't say for sure that they do or do not. I have never encountered one personally but several people claim to have over history. The real question I think, is: do vampires exist today? Are they walking the Earth right now, looking for victims?

I don't know of any recent, credible vampire sightings. Most recorded vampire encounters are from several centuries ago. If vampires do exist in present day, they appear to be hiding better than they used to. This may or may not be true, but there are several explanations for why this may seem to be the case.

1. Dead Men Don't Tell Tales - It's not easy to escape after a vampire attack. With their speed and stealth, chances are if you do indeed encounter one and realize it, you are probably already dead. If not, you are probably in the process of becoming one yourself. Either way, you're not going to be able to tell anyone about the sighting.

2. Hiding In Plain Sight - With the popularity of vampires, several subcultures have formed that try to mimic vampiric behavior, dress, and customs. Think about this - if you saw someone walking down the street dressed like Count Dracula you would probably either (a) think he was heading to a costume party or (b) think he was crazy. There's a very small chance that you would believe that you had just walked past the real Count Dracula. So what would a vampire's best disguise be? Pretending to be a human acting like a vampire.

3. Nobody Believes In Vampires - Most important of all, the general population does not believe that vampires really exist. If you were attacked by a vampire and somehow escaped and lived, how many people would believe your story? It's human nature to try to come up with a known explanation for frightening events. If you showed up at the hospital with bite marks in your neck, the doctors might think that you were bitten by a person who thought they were a vampire, but there's only the tiniest chance they would actually believe that you were the real victim of a real vampire attack.

For all of these reasons (and more), if there are vampires around, chances are very high that we aren't going to know about it. Even with the proliferation of information, a monster sighting is only good if people believe it. If you don't believe me, check out the True Scary Stories section of this website. It's filled with tales of actual paranormal encounters from the witnesses themselves. While readers may choose to believe them or not, nobody is taking these all too seriously.

So maybe vampires exist, and maybe they don't. The irony is we will probably never know either way, and if we do find out, we'll probably never live long enough to tell anyone.

-Mike