Real Vampires, Night Stalkers and Creatures from the Darkside. Brad Steiger

checked Haigh’s workshop for traces of the missing persons, some human gallstones were discovered in the sludge.

      Some theorists have wondered if feelings of guilt arising from his homosexual abuse experience drove the impressionable Haigh to offer such terrible propitiation of blood sacrifice. Or, perhaps, Haigh may have mistaken the intoxication he reportedly felt from blood drinking to the “high” that comes from religious ecstasy.

      As fascinating as such theories may be as attempts to cast further light on vampirism, they will never be answered in the case of John Haigh, for his further testimonies became increasingly muddled until he was sentenced to death for the murders of nine victims and delivered to the hangman on April 6, 1949.

       The Immortal Count de Saint-Germain

      Today, many occult groups claim the Count de Saint-Germain as their spirit guide, and he remains popular as a spiritual mentor from other dimensions of reality. Others maintain that the Count de Saint-Germain continues to walk Earth, so that he might on occasion offer his counsel to men and women in high political places.

      I have thought that the Count would be a strong candidate for the perfect vampire. He never stayed in any one place for too long; many people went missing in those days and disappeared without a trace; persons of the lower classes were often murdered by their superiors without suffering severe consequences.

       Count de Saint-Germain … had already lived 2,000 years by partaking of a regenerative liquid that could prolong human life indefinitely.

      In the 1780s, Frederick the Great of Prussia called the Count de Saint-Germain the man who could not die, for according to the Count, a self-professed master alchemist, he had already lived 2,000 years by partaking of a regenerative liquid that could prolong human life indefinitely. Could an integral element in that elixir of life have been human blood?

      Saint-Germain spoke and wrote Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, Arabic, Chinese, French, German, English, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish. He was also a talented painter. His skill at mixing pigments was extraordinary, and famous painters begged in vain for the count to reveal his formulas. As if his mastery of brush and pigments were not extraordinary enough, Saint-Germain was also an accomplished virtuoso on the harpsichord and violin.

      Obviously, since he claimed to have walked the Earth for 2,000 years, Saint-Germain’s knowledge of history was unsurpassed. He would refer to a pleasant chat with the Queen of Sheba and relay amusing anecdotes of Babylonian court gossip. He would speak with reverence of the miraculous event that he had witnessed at the marriage feast at Cana when the young rabbi Jesus turned water into wine.

      The remarkable count was first and foremost a successful alchemist, and it was widely rumored that he had succeeded in transforming base metals into gold. He could remove flaws from diamonds, and in this way improved one of the gems of King Louis XV. His chemical training far surpassed that of his contemporaries of the eighteenth century.

      Members of Europe’s royal courts also heard him speak often of an invention which would occur in the next century and which would unite people of all lands. He called it a steamboat, and he implied that it would be he who would be on hand in the future to help create the vessel.

      Who was the Count de Saint-Germain and what was his true place of origin? It has been advanced by some scholars that the man was a clever spy on a secret mission who had deliberately shrouded his past with mystery. Why, these scholars ask, would the skeptical Prussian King Frederick promote such fantastic tales of the count unless he had some reason to do so?

      Saint-Germain seems to betray himself as a diplomat with his astounding knowledge of the political past. Having gained access to secret court files, he could have studied European history methodically and with earnest purpose. His wide range of claimed artistic talents may have been wildly exaggerated by those who would stand to gain by the Count’s missions.

      Old records show that Saint-Germain died in the arms of two chambermaids at the court of the Landgrave of Hessen-Cassel, a fervent alchemist. But in spite of his supposed death, there are many recorded instances of the reappearance of the count. Many believe that he only feigned death, just as he had done many times before, so that he could go on sipping of his elixir of life and observing world events from a more quiet perspective.

      After the fall of the Bastille in July 1789, Marie Antoinette received a letter of warning that was allegedly signed by the Count de Saint-Germain. Madame Adhemar, Marie Antoinette’s confidant, kept a rendezvous with the Count in a chapel. Saint-Germain, then supposedly dead for five years, told her that he had done everything that he could to prevent the Revolution, but that the great magician Cagliostro, a former pupil and a fervent antimonarchist, had taken control of the events. It was further said that Count de Saint-Germain showed himself many times during the French Revolution. He was said to have been observed often near the guillotine, sadly shaking his head.

      Could Saint-Germain truly have been a paraphysical being who had been taken over by a spirit parasite in ancient times?

      It was claimed by many that Saint-Germain could render himself invisible—a remarkable accomplishment said to often have been witnessed. He was also a proficient hypnotist and could himself fall at will into a state of self-hypnosis.

       Since I first wrote of the Count in the 1950s, I have heard from numerous individuals who claim to have encountered the legendary being. I am not referring to members of various secret societies who claim Count de Saint-Germain as their master teacher, but serious minded individuals—many of them experienced paranormal researchers. Only recently some investigators have told me that they have spoken with the Count as he stood in the shadows and that he promised to return to them and make himself more fully known to them. My advice is to practice extreme caution when arranging such a rendezvous.

       As an interesting postscript to my theorizing that Count de Saint-Germain would have made the perfect vampire, I learned that Chelsea Quinn Yarbo has written a series of novels in which the eternal Count moves through time as a vampire. I guess I was not the only one who had begun to suspect the “man who lives forever.”

      Vampires and Werewolves

      In 1941, Hollywood reinvented the centuries-old legend of the werewolf in The Wolf Man starring Lon Chaney Jr., Evelyn Ankers, and Claude Rains. Just as the motion picture Dracula transformed the hideous vampire of folklore into an elegantly attired sex symbol granting eternal life to those once bitten, The Wolf Man transformed the savage lupine shape-shifter into a sympathetic individual tortured by the full Moon into becoming half-man/half-wolf. In both fictional reinventions of the monsters, vampires and werewolves increase their kind by biting or scratching humans, thereby initiating a process that will remake their victims in their own image.

      In the old records that recounted vicious attacks by creatures described as werewolves, the victims were described as being torn to bloody pieces. In some cases, there was nothing left of the unfortunate victim but gory shreds of flesh and a few bones to be carried away by smaller predators. Surely, such bloody scraps could not begin the process of metamorphosis into a werewolf.

      Although sprigs of garlic and crucifixes were deemed by some venerable traditions as a first line of defense against both vampires and werewolves, wolfbane, the silver bullet, and other means of warding off a werewolf were largely imagined by screenwriter Curt Siodmak for the 1941 classic film. Even the ancient “gypsy folklore” repeated by Ms. Ankers, the heroine, was created by Siodmak: “Even a man who’s pure in heart and says his prayers at night, may become a wolf when the wolfbane blooms and the autumn moon is bright.”

      There is no known culture on this planet that has not at one time or another cowered in fear because of a belief in the savage attacks of a nocturnal predator known as a therianthrope, a human-animal hybrid such as a werewolf or a werebear. Such creatures were painted by Stone Age artists more than 10,000