The Truth About Vampires

According to John Heinrich Zophius's 1733 Dissertatio de Vampiris Serviensibus:

Vampires issue forth from their graves in the night, attack people sleeping quietly in their beds, suck out all their blood from their bodies, and they destroy them. They beset men, women, and children alike sparing neither age nor sex. Those who are under the fatal malignity of their influence complain of suffocation and a total deficiency of spirits, after which they soon expire. Some who, when at the point of death, have been asked if they can tell what is causing their decrease, reply that such and such persons, lately dead, have arisen from the tomb to torment and torture them.

This is the legend. What is the truth?

Human beings have rarely been able to regard vampires with anything less than instinctive repugnance. Even viewed through the lens of science rather than superstition, vampirism combines the most repellant features of parasitism and insanity, robbing the once-human victim not only of their body, but of their "soul", or sense of self.

For centuries, the ignorant populace considered vampirism to be a form of demonic possession, an evil spirit inhabiting a corpse and compelling it to rise from its grave and suck the blood of the living. In the early 1900�s, scientists realized that vampirism was caused by some sort of infectious agent and gave it the half-facetious name Draculae exsanguinous (bloodsucking Dracula).¹ For many years, the entity responsible was speculated to be some form of bacteria or virus. The difficulty in collecting specimens hobbled further investigation until fairly recently, when the true and rather more complex answer was discovered.

Infernalis haemolestes: "Blood-thief from hell"

Although sensationalistic, the name makes a point. The creature we refer to as a "vampire" is, in fact, a human body harboring a symbiotic colony of Infernalis organisms that threads and interweaves throughout its structure, replacing many of the human organs, altering the metabolism, reprogramming the brain and transforming the victim's very DNA.

The colony itself is an organized cooperative of sedentary, specialized polyps or "zooids". These distinct animals are specialized to perform specific tasks that benefit the colony as a whole, such as feeding, reproductive, and protective zooids. Each zooid is an individual, but their integration with each other is so strong that the colony attains the character of one large individual. ²

The Infernalis collective does more than merely occupy its host. Using horizontal gene transfer, it splices foreign DNA into the host�s cells, inducing various transformations that adapt the host to its new way of life, and render it unable to survive without the Infernalis colony.

The vampire reproduces when it drinks human blood and the larvae swimming in its salivary glands are introduced into the victim�s bloodstream. As an endoparasite, Infernalis cannot survive for long outside of a human host and under normal circumstances the human immune system will destroy invading larvae. If the victims dies or experiences a severe drop in body temperature while infested, however, the larvae will implant and quickly establish a new colony.

This site provides a valuable overview of the best current knowledge of the changes Infernalis effects in a human host to create the being known as a vampire, elucidates the feeding and social behavior of vampires, explores the complex life cycle of the organism itself, speculates as to its evolutionary history, and debunks vampire myths common in folklore and mass media.

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1. A nomen nudum, or invalid name, as it wasn�t accompanied by a description or a definition of the taxon that it denotes.
2. The difference between a colonial organism and a multicellular organism is that individual organisms separated from the colony can survive on their own, while tissue cells from a multicellular life form cannot.