Spooky superstitions and tales of the supernatural are as old as time itself, but have you ever wondered where Halloween’s most beloved monsters come from?
Dracula – Romania
Count Dracula bears his pearly white fangs. © eschipul
Legends of immortal blood-sucking demons have been told the world over for millennia, and these days vampires come in all shapes and forms – from sexy pale-faced teenagers to sparkling creatures of the night. But none can compare to the enduring legacy of that notorious cloaked nobleman we all know as Count Dracula.
We can thank Bram Stoker – author of the 1897 novel ‘Dracula’ – for delving into the lore and legends of misty medieval Romania and creating this unearthly aristocrat. Stoker got the name from the sinister 15th century Transylvanian ruler Vlad III Dracula (dracul is Romanian for devil!), whose vicious practices saw him dubbed “The Impaler”.
While many Romanian ruins are tied to Vlad, The Impaler’s reign, Bran Castle in Törzburg is the closest you’ll get to Count Dracula’s eerie mountain dwelling.
Frankenstein’s monster – Switzerland
A friendly-looking Frankenstein’s monster. © Newsbie Pix
Another creepy character immortalized in writing, the freaky fiend reanimated from death by Doctor Victor Frankenstein, was penned by the hand of 18-year-old Mary Shelley in 1816.
Considered the first science-fiction novel, Shelley claimed the idea came to her in a dream after spending a rainy summer on the shores of Lake Geneva in Switzerland, where much of the story takes place.
The party staying at Villa Diodati spent a lot of their time indoors due to the bad weather and entertained themselves by reading ghost stories and discussing new scientific ideas budding at the time.The group then decided to write their own spooky tales and, after that fateful dream, Frankenstein and his monster were born.
However, it wouldn’t be until the 1931 film adaptation that Boris Karloff’s grotesque make-up transformed the blood-curdling monster into the tongue-tied lumbering green brute we know today.
The Mummy – Egypt
Even mummies look before they cross the road. © eleephotography
Of course there was nothing supernatural about mummies to the Ancient Egyptians, in fact, they saw death not as fearful but as a sacred passing – hence the ceremonious rituals. So why the popular idea of the mummy’s curse? Well, it’s down to those occult-obsessed Victorians again.
In 1922, Howard Carter discovered the tomb of King Tutankhamun near Luxor in Egypt, uncovering a 3,000 year-old hidden treasure. Back home in Britain, the press – and the public – went wild.
When Lord Carnavaron, the expedition’s sponsor, was taken ill following the trip and later died, rumors of a curse began to spread, aided once more by truth-bending newspapers. Even though Carter himself lived to be an old man, the hype lingered. It is even said that Carter’s pet canary was eaten by a cobra and this too was attributed to the curse, since cobras were the protectors of Egyptian Pharaohs!
Today, we think of cursed mummies as staggering corpses with arms outstretched, but real mummies were bundled up pretty tight… if they were to rise from their perpetual slumber, they would have hopped or rolled, not walked!
The Werewolf – Greece
Beware the werewolves looming in the dark. © TRIUMPHSIX
Believe it or not, the first mention of werewolves in recorded history is from all the way back in 1 A.D.! The Ancient Greeks wrote allegories about men who – by curse or affliction – escaped their human form.
The formal term for shape-shifting is lycanthropy, from the Greek ‘lykos’ meaning wolf and ‘anthropos’ meaning man. The most widespread story goes that the mythological King Lycaeon, suspicious of Zeus’s alleged omniscience, served the god a meal of human flesh to test his divine powers. As punishment for his gory act he was doomed to a solitary cannibalistic werewolf existence.
Mount Lykaion, in the Arcadia region of Greece, is named after the ill-fated king and means Wolf Mountain.
Witches – Salem, USA
Witch is the new black.
Belief in some form of practical magic has been a part of the human experience since our ancestors stared in wonder at their discovery of fire. Within the Christian framework of good versus evil, witchcraft would become inextricably connected with the notion of devil worship and it wouldn’t be long before the Western world went on a large-scale witch-hunt.
Arguably the most infamous of these persecutions were the Salem witch trials held in 17th century colonial Massachusetts. When a young girl in the community began having violent contortions and screaming fits, a local doctor diagnosed her with bewitchment – many other ‘victims’ soon followed. In the end, over 200 people were accused of practicing ‘the devil’s magic’ before the colony admitted the trials had been a mistake.
Despite its gloomy past, the city of Salem is still today the place to visit for all things witch-y… even the police car logos have witches riding broomsticks!
Zombies – Haiti
Zombies can be sexy too. © Grmisiti
Named after the Haitian Creole ‘zonbi’, the zombie figure has its roots in rural Afro-Caribbean folklore, where it was – and often still is – believed to be someone raised from the dead and puppeteered by sorcerers known as ‘bokor’. This magically reanimated corpse would be brought back to life, usually as some form of punishment, without speech or free will.
Sounds familiar, right? But what about the insatiable hunger for a juicy fresh chunk of healthy human? The present day zombie vogue – depicting cadaverous flesh-eaters crawling en masse out of shabby graves – is, perhaps unsurprisingly, a lot more Hollywood than Haiti.
Despite never mentioning them by name, George A. Romero’s low-budget horror flick ‘Night of the Living Dead’, is widely considered the parent of the modern fictional zombie. These days we’re pretty comfy with the notion of these unsavory undead beings, but when the film was released in 1968 the audience was more than a little shaken!
