In Episode 88 we found a lot of conflicting stories about where vampires came from, then got sidetracked before working out the answer. So thankyou, Ray from Belfast, who has stepped forward to claim that vampires are a home team:
The whole Vampires mythology actually comes from Ireland. The O’Caithan legend (Pronounced Oh Ka-han) is the earliest known legend about blood eaters. Apparently in Dungiven, County Derry, there was a local baddy/boogie man who demanded to eat the blood of one person of every family in the town in retribution for wrongly convicting him of a crime.
So O’Caithan (the local hero) was summoned to kill the baddy, and therefore became the first vampire slayer.
There are lots of legends like this in Irish mythology, especially surrounding the Irish famine when cannibalism was rife, although this isn’t the most politically correct thing to broadcast!
It was these legends that inspired Bram Stoker to write his now world famous Dracula stories. To avoid domestic criticism, he set the stories in Eastern Europe.
I think you’ll find that there was no history of blood eaters in Eastern Europe before this.
Now. It seems perfectly convincing, but so did the Irishman who told me that there are no snakes, homosexuals or feminists in Ireland because St Patrick got rid of them all. So if anyone else wants to pipe up and tell us that in fact all vampire myths are based on Surrey commuters, comment below!
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