When did the first vampire tale/legend arise?
If the werewolf is closely related to witches, the vampire is closely related to ghosts. Vampires are, most generally, corpses (living dead) that rise up out of their tombs and suck the blood of the living. The vampire legend is neither as old nor as widespread as that of the werewolf or other were¬animals. The latter’s basic pattern is found throughout recorded history, and all over the world from Siberia to South Africa; but the basic pattern of the vampire story developed into the form we know today only about the 16th and 17th centuries, and principally in the Balkan peninsula and neighboring areas. (In antiquity there were beings that seem to be cousins of the vampire bloodsucking ghosts, magicians, or witches-but these have only a few cor¬respondences with the vampire pattern.) The word vampire is itself of Slavonic origin. Montague Summers tells us there is a Magyar word vampir, and finds close variants in Russian, Czech, Polish, and Hungarian. The word did not enter the English
