by Sarah A. Peterson-Camacho

“To be a successful villainess, one would presuppose there must be some personal charm about the person…She wears all the earmarks of the vampire type…She has intensely dark hair, severely straight across her brow; very blackened eyebrows; and a finger ring with a setting as big as a tombstone…”
–The Fresno Morning Republican, Thursday, January 17, 1918

“The vamp was the dark shadow of the Victorian virtuous woman. She was immoral, tainted with powerful, dark sexuality…She attached herself to men and sapped their vitality…Her nails were long and cut to a point.”–J. Gordon Melton, Ph.D., The Vampire Book, 3rd ed. (2011)

Fresno, California, Monday, October 16, 1916

The wolf woman and the vampire melded effortlessly that night—two monsters become one. And with kohl-rimmed eyes and a dark little heart of a pout, she was indeed a stunner.

For under the silver egg of a waning Hunters Moon—one rather balmy Monday night in the middle of October 1916—a crowd of cinema fiends breathlessly awaited the premiere of Raymond B. West’s The Wolf Woman at Fresno’s Kinema movie house.

“At the Kinema last night—” pondered The Fresno Morning Republican resident film critic, known only as R— “the doors were jammed for an hour with people eager to see the ‘wolf woman.’ They went to see what evil a woman can do to men. Were they interested in what the woman does to herself? I wonder if they cared.”

Starring stage and silent screen siren Louise Glaum as the eponymous vampy villainess, The Wolf Woman wove a scandalous yarn of two brothers both in love with the same wicked beauty. And although the movie ended tragically, it did not disappoint. “The photography was excellent,” R wrote, “the dramatic progress of the story was clear and understandable, and the people well-chosen.”

Particularly well-chosen was Glaum, whose dramatic side profile graced page nine of the Republican in a midnight flurry of black feathers and spidery lashes. “Wolf Woman startles big audience at Kinema,” the Fresno paper proclaimed beneath her visage. “Louise Glaum…has the stellar role in one of the most gripping plays this season.”

“Miss Glaum gives a characterization that is alluring to a startling degree,” The Fresno Herald chimed in, “terribly vicious—but with an element of sympathy because we know that she knows no better.”

And the very next month, the “Fine Arts vampire” herself would descend upon Fresno—enveloped in a raven froth of glittery darkness—to attend a movie ball given in her honor. She would even be escorted by Fresno’s own mayor!

A deliciously dark star rising alongside the likes of Theda Bara and Pauline Frederick, this sultry femme fatale of the silent film had officially entered her Vamp Era.

For nothing so titillates as the lady vampire—her legendary beauty, her lethal seduction skills, her even more lethal bloodlust.

But the evolution of the female bloodsucker to the vamp of the silent silver screen makes for a wildly curvy, serpentine journey to the very dark heart of mythology itself. Laced with copious amounts of blood, sex, and soul-stealing, it makes for one delicious hell of a ride.

Care to join me?

Sumer/Mesopotamia, 2,000 B.C.

According to Hebrew folklore, by way of ancient Sumer and Mesopotamia … in the beginning, there was Lilith—gorgeous, snaky first wife of the biblical Adam, created of the same Edenic clay as he … but soon enough, there was trouble brewing in Paradise.

Sex was only part of the problem; not only would he not let her initiate any romantic overtures, but Adam refused to acknowledge Lilith as his equal. So away she flew with the bats and the screech owls to the desert by the Red Sea … where she married Satan—who was known as Samael—and let her freak flag fly, birthing hundreds of demons by the day.

On the rebound, Adam asked God for a new partner, one who would let him lead. Hence God put the first man into a deep sleep, took out one of his ribs, and sculpted it into the woman of Adam’s dreams. He called her Eve, and all was great for a while, until that pesky snake came along to undermine God’s authority. And, according to legend, the serpent was none other than Lilith herself.

All hell broke loose—a proverbial Pandora’s Box of marital distrust, exile, fig-leaf couture, painful childbirth, sibling rivalry, and cold-blooded murder.

Done sowing discord in the Garden of Eden, Lilith returned to the Red Sea to reunite with Samael … but not for long. God had tired of the demoness’ games, so He neutered her husband as a form of demon birth control. But Lilith merely set her predatory sights on other fertile game—namely, human men, including her ex, Adam.

So, along with her favorite daughter, Lilith the Younger, the she-demon flew forth from her desert lair to further stoke God’s wrath. She and her female minions descended upon the sleeping human male populace by night—begetting even more demon children as they sapped their victims’ sexual energy via their dreams.

And thus, Lilith became known as the first vampire … except as a succubus, it was not blood upon which she quenched her thirst; it was her male prey’s psychosexual vitality that fed her insatiable appetites. Perhaps it was an act of revenge, with all of mankind standing in for the one man she could not forgive.

Hence the mother of all demons began her undead existence as a psychic vampire, predating her earliest bloodsucking sisters by at least half a millennium.

But as Lilith’s myth evolved over time, the souls of young children would become a secondary source of psychic nourishment for the insatiable demoness. And as one millennium gave way to the next, the protective charms and incantations that Hebrew mothers chanted—to keep Lilith from stealing the souls of their slumbering young—evolved into the modern “lullaby” (from “Lilith-Abi,” a Hebrew phrase for “Lilith, begone!”).

By the Middle Ages, another word would derive its origin from this very same she-demon: a “night mare” referred to a female demon or “night hag” responsible for sleep paralysis. She would straddle a sleeping victim’s chest to steal their ability to breathe, speak, or move.

Early sufferers of this sleep disorder were thus said to be “hag-ridden.”

Greece, 500 B.C.

Queen Lamia of Libya was the achingly lovely mortal daughter of the Greek sea god Poseidon. Zeus—the king of the Greek gods—fell in love with her. Dazzled by her legendary beauty, Zeus seduced Lamia, and over the ensuing years, she bore him several children.

But when Zeus’ wife Hera discovered their secret affair, she stole their children away in the dead of night—then flung them to the far corners of the earth, so the beautiful Libyan queen could never find them.

The grief over losing her children drove Queen Lamia quite literally insane—so much so that she lashed out against her loyal subjects, kidnapping and devouring their children across the kingdom. And then, making her way across the glittering Mediterranean towards Greece, Lamia transformed into a hideous, serpentine sea monster, cannibalizing anyone who dared cross her watery path.

Of her three children with Zeus, daughters Scylla and Herophile, and son Acheilus, all of whom she would never see again——only Herophile would escape a monstrous fate, becoming one of the first Sibyls of Delphi. But as for Lamia herself (“Lamia” meaning “lone shark”), she carved a well-earned space for herself in the Greek pantheon of monsters—her legend eventually becoming a classic Greek bogeyman tale told by Greek mothers to scare their children into behaving.

Centuries later, however, the singular sea monster Lamia found herself morphing yet again, this time multiplying into the plural Lamiae by the third century, A.D. These serpentine seductresses were Lilith-like succubae who took that Hebrew she-demon’s predatory game to the next level. Looking like beautiful women with serpent tails, they were known for attracting and seducing unsuspecting mortal men into bed—only to feast on their flesh and blood as a postcoital snack.

Considered by some to be the first female bloodsuckers in antiquity, the Lamiae ushered in a new breed of vampire, giving bloodlust a whole new meaning.

Munster, Ireland, A.D. 0

Her hair was as fiery as her will, as red as the flames licking the Celtic night come Samhain. Her eyes were green as the rolling Irish hills she called home. Indeed, her beauty was so renowned all over the Gaelic Kingdom of Munster, her scheming father knew he could command a high bride price for her hand.

But his lovely, spirited daughter had fallen in love with a peasant farmer—a kind and compassionate young man she’d known since she was a wee lass. And, unbeknownst to her father, the besotted pair had become secretly engaged. So as they dreamed of a shared future in idyllic pastures, her father began fielding offers of marriage in earnest.

Eventually he chose a powerful clan chieftain, as wealthy and land rich as he was handsome and cruel. But the good-looking brute had offered the highest bride price, and a deal was a deal.

Fully expecting his only daughter to be pleased with her newly intended, the father blew his cork when she informed him of her secret betrothal to a peasant farmer. Then she wept bitterly because she knew she had no choice in the matter; her father formally broke off her prior engagement, then locked her away as wedding preparations commenced.

Her true love watched from afar as the nuptials took place at the chieftain’s towering castle—heartsick and helpless in his knowledge that eloping would have proven futile. Not only might the couple have been hunted down by her father and the chieftain’s army, but the farmer knew his livelihood was tied up in the land on which he farmed; therefore, he would not have been able to provide for her while on the run.

Meanwhile, the proud father—his pockets now full at the expense of his only child’s happiness—gave his heartbroken daughter away in marriage to the highest bidder. He then bid her farewell and promptly abandoned the weeping bride while he enjoyed his heinously acquired riches.

The unhappy new wife endured months of her husband’s alcohol-fueled assaults, his infidelities, cruelty, and drunken tirades. And—forever dreaming of her faithful first love—she slowly wasted away and died.

Her autumn burial was a simple, solemn affair, but the funeral feast was as lavish as it was raucous. Her blitzed widower hit the sack with several gold-digging wenches that very same night, after which he took up with a veritable stable of mistresses. Why bother marrying again?

And the moldering remains of his deceased wife languished in the ground for another four seasons, until … on the first anniversary of her death, she arose from her grave as the Dearg Due (“Red Thirst” in Gaelic). Even more unearthly beautiful than she had been in life—her fiery tresses now deepened to the hue of blood, her emerald eyes now full of poison—she awoke with only one goal in mind: revenge.

The Dearg Due stalked her way through the darkened hills, arriving at her father’s swanky new digs in no time at all. Slipping silently through an unlocked window, she came upon his snoring form, promptly straddled his chest—and then his undead daughter sucked the life out of him, deflating his lungs as one would a pair of worn-out balloons.

But wait … what was that she tasted on his last dying gasp? A ruby mist of blood coated her lips. And thus, the Dearg Due’s eternal “red thirst” was born.

Off again she swept through the hilly autumn dark, off to her widower’s looming castle—where, occasionally, he’d kept her locked away in a tower, much as her father once had. But this very night found her passed-out former partner asleep amid the slumbering heap of his many mistresses, strewn as they were across the hopelessly tainted marital bed.

His undead bride’s piercing scream of rage echoed through the cavernous castle, scattering his concubines down its dank stone halls. And then—leaping upon her now-cowering husband’s chest—the Dearg Due lowered her bloodied mouth to his in a fatal kiss … for after she had sucked every last breath from his lungs, she sank her teeth into his throat and drank her fill of his rich, copper-sweet blood. (Talk about overkill.)

Now sated for the time being, Red Thirst returned to her grave for another twelvemonth … until the second anniversary of her death, when again she rose to slake her undying thirst for blood. After all, it was the only night of the year that she could.

And every year since—on the date she gave up her ghost—this lethally lovely Irish vampire haunts the pitch-black backroads of rural Munster, where she lures lustful male travelers far off the beaten track. But after a night of passion in the hills, Red Thirst strikes, draining her one-night stands dry by morning.

Legend has it that she still slumbers in the ground beneath Strongbow’s Tree—beside the medieval Reginald’s Tower—in what is now Waterford City, County Waterford, near the emerald coast of southeastern Munster. For it is there that one particular grave can be found covered with large, impossibly heavy stones … said to have been placed there to keep the Dearg Due from rising one night a year to feed on an unsuspecting male populace.

The Irish legend of Red Thirst melded both the psychic and the bloodsucking lady vampires of antiquity, in the evolution of this hot mess of a mythical female monster. But in the centuries to come, this hybrid model would split into two distinct species of succubae—and into two legendary literary rivals.

As Christianity overtook Europe like the Black Death sweeping the continent, vampire folklore dove underground during the Renaissance—only to reemerge as literal belief in the Slavic nations to the east. Even as the Age of Enlightenment gave way to the Industrial Revolution, so-called vampire panics dotted rural Eastern Europe wherever epidemics tore through pastoral communities.

But fact and folklore bled together in the early 17th century as a bloodthirsty Hungarian countess—descended from the royal ranks of Transylvanian nobility—acted out her gruesome, sanguinary fantasies with impunity in a literal chamber of horrors.

Meet the Blood Countess…

Cachtice, Slovakia, A.D. 1610

Winter gripped the Little Carpathians in its icy fingers, the snow-covered slopes rising like frozen ghosts against the black sky.

When Reverand Janos Ponikenusz descended upon the Slovakian village of Cachtice in the early months of 1610, he could not ignore the peasants’ whispering of vampires and missing women. He approached the dreary castle on a steep cliff, overlooking the village below.

With an involuntary shiver, he wondered just who—or what—he would find there.

But the castle’s widowed mistress put him immediately at ease. Though her massive digs were dank and creepy, Countess Elizabeth Bathory was preternaturally beautiful, her raven tresses piled high above a smooth, ivory complexion, luminous dark eyes, and a full, sensuous pout. She was still a siren at the age of fifty, but Rev. Janos pushed such thoughts away. He had a job to do here—namely to take over where his recently deceased predecessor had left off.

But as the unassuming Reverand settled in at his new small parish, he made some disturbing discoveries. “He found long lists of names of young women who had died in the employ of the countess—women his predecessor would inter only at night…One note indicated that he had recently entombed nine women in a single night, in an underground crypt near the castle walls” (Vronsky 83).

The heavy doors of the crypt yawned in creaking darkness as Rev. Janos pried them open. The putrid stench of decaying flesh rose like a phantom to assault his nostrils, and what he found was worse than he ever could have imagined. Nine pine boxes—their lids not even nailed shut—revealed the burned, mutilated corpses of the nine young women the previous pastor had written about. Some of the remains even had human bite marks…

The horrified Reverand sent immediate word to his ecclesiastical superior in the provincial capital, setting off a covert, months-long investigation conducted by the Hungarian parliament. And what their detective work revealed were literally decades of the countess’ dark, bloody deeds…

Five decades earlier, the noblewoman who would become known as the world’s most prolific female serial killer was born in Nyirbator, Hungary, in 1560. Betrothed at age eleven to a Hungarian count five years her senior, Elizabeth Bathory grew up with a feral freedom usually denied to girls of noble birth.

Impregnated by a peasant boy at the age of fourteen, she was sent into hiding to await her child’s birth. Her family handed the infant over to be raised by a local family, then delivered their wayward daughter to her awaiting count.

In 1575, Elizabeth Bathory married Count Ferenc Nadasdy at the age of fifteen, and theirs proved to be a happy, fruitful marriage. But after raising five children—and grown weary of her husband’s long absences spent fighting the Turks—the mistress of Cachtice Castle had grown bored. And worse, she had developed a cruel streak as well.

So began the countess’ decades-long cycle of torture, mutilation, and murder of a rumored 650 young women: mostly servant girls and peasants, but later, also daughters of minor nobility. It was also rumored that her husband, the count, would join her in her chamber of horrors when he wasn’t away at war—even teaching his murderous wife new and increasingly cruel torture techniques he’d learned on the battlefield.

After the death of Count Nadasdy in 1604, his grieving widow’s bloodlust only grew—but by 1610, she had grown complacent and sloppy. The battered corpses of young women were popping up in fields, along roadsides, and in local bodies of water. By now, Elizabeth Bathory’s heinous activities were an open secret; with the arrival of Rev. Janos, however, the Blood Countess’ days of freedom were numbered. (Perhaps sensing her imminent capture, Bathory wrote out her will several months before her apprehension.)

The Hungarian parliament, their investigation now complete, sent Prince George Thurzo—a distant relation of the countess through marriage—to make the arrest. At first skeptical of these horrific rumors’ veracity, Thurzo nevertheless arrived at Cachtice Castle with his men just two days after Christmas, 1610. But what they ultimately discovered proved to be beyond their wildest nightmares.

Prince Thurzo presided over the top-secret trial, promptly executed the quartet of Bathory’s servant accomplices—who spilled all her bloody secrets after days of their own torture—and then locked the serial murderess away in a tower of her own castle, for the rest of her life.

Elizabeth Bathory’s four surviving children, now grown and married with families of their own, sealed the trial records to protect the family’s extensive assets. Their mother died just four years later in 1614, at the age of 54—after which her heirs quietly split up her massive wealth and multiple properties.

Then all was forgotten for over a century … until 1720, the year Jesuit scholar Laszlo Turoczi would uncover the trial records in his research. The legend of the Blood Countess would take on a life of its own after its inclusion in Turoczi’s 1729 account Tragica Historia (“Tragic History”).

And several hundred miles away, in the tiny village of Medvegia, Serbia—as Laszlo Turoczi scribbled away about Elizabeth Bathory’s bloody exploits—a trio of mistreated and forgotten dead women were making a posthumous name for themselves as vampiric queens of the night…

As widespread epidemics laid waste to the rural populations of Eastern Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries, the survivors sought a scapegoat in the vampire of Slavic folklore—and a string of vampire panics sprang up in the wake of contagious disease wiping out entire villages.

But it wasn’t until the 1720s that one particular vampire panic in Medvegia, Serbia, garnered worldwide attention, introducing this legendary bloodsucker to society at large. All thanks to the prolific occult writings of French Benedictine abbot and scholar Dom. Antoine Augustin Calmet…

Medvegia, Serbia, A.D. 1725

Around 1725—before he died breaking his neck in a fall from a hay-wagon—a Serbian hajduk (a mercenary or outlaw) named Arnold Paole told his compatriots of being haunted by a vampire.

In some accounts, Paole killed the undead creature, and in others, he became its victim; regardless, “to extricate himself,” read a June 1732 Philadelphia American Weekly Mercury, “he had eaten some of the Earth of the Vampyre’s Grave—and rub’d himself with [its] Blood.”

When four people in Paole’s inner circle died within days of his fatal accident, the villagers of Medvegia dug up the dead man’s grave. They found his corpse bloated, but otherwise undecayed, fresh blood leaking from his facial orifices.

“…they, according to custom, drove a Stake through his Heart—at which he gave a horrid Groan, and lost a good deal of Blood. Afterwards, they burnt his body to Ashes the same day, and threw them in his Grave.”

But in the decade to follow, Death would continue to stalk the Serbian village of Medvegia. Seventeen people died over a three-month span in the harsh winter of 1731-1732—including two women who’d claimed vampire contact before they passed, and a young stepdaughter strangled to death in her bed. And, suspecting another vampire was on the loose, the villagers of Medvegia exhumed all seventeen.

Stana—a 20-year-old who had died several days after birthing a stillborn—told her family, before she passed, that she’d smeared vampire blood on herself and her deceased newborn, presumably to prevent them both from rising out of the grave. (Women who died in childbirth—and infants who passed before being baptized—were considered especially vulnerable to vampirism.)

Sixty-year-old Miliza, before she faded away, had confessed to practicing protective magic: feeding on the flesh of two sheep killed by vampires, as a ward against becoming one of the undead. (Because of this, the presumed witch had been posthumously deemed the instigating vampire in this particular string of deaths.)

And then there was the stepdaughter, Stanacka, also 20, who had been strangled in bed—“throttled at midnight”—most likely by her stepfather, who had claimed the ghost of his deceased friend had been the murderer. (Despite this, the official record chalks her death up to a “three-day illness,” meaning that most likely, Stanacka had spent her last three days unconscious, slowly expiring of oxygen deprivation to her brain.)

After being exhumed along with the rest of the deceased, the three dead women were found to be blood-plump and well-preserved … and therefore, vampires.

Disturbing details abounded, however, in the recorded autopsy notes: Stana likely had died from sepsis due to un-expelled afterbirth; all the men who “were standing around marveled greatly at [the elderly Miliza’s] plumpness and perfect body”; and “there was also to be seen—on the right side, under the ear—a bloodshot blue mark, the length of a finger” on the throat of the strangled Stanacka (Barber 17-18).

In the end, all three were staked, beheaded, and cremated alongside the other exhumed corpses … making Stana, Miliza, and Stanacka three of the earliest named and identified female vampires in Old World folklore.

May they be remembered not merely as tropes: a young, single mother without reliable healthcare; an old witch scorned in life, sexually objectified in death; and a young woman who paid with her life for rejecting her stepfather’s nightly advances.

And may they all three rest in peace.

Works Cited
“‘Wolf Woman’, Featuring Louise Glaum, is Kinema Play Today.” The Fresno Herald, Monday, October 16, 1916, p. 10.
“Once More the Vampire.” The Fresno Morning Republican, Tuesday, October 17, 1916, p. 4.
“‘Wolf Woman’ Startles Big Audience at Kinema.” The Fresno Morning Republican, Tuesday, October 17, 1916, p. 9.
“Screen Star to Be Visitor in Fresno This Week.” The Fresno Morning Republican, Sunday, November 26, 1916, p. 16.
Koltuv, Barbara Black, Ph.D. The Book of Lilith. Lake Worth, Florida: Nicolas-Hays, Inc., 1986.
“Romance Gilds Words: ‘Lullaby.’” The Pasadena Star-News, Saturday, January 8, 1921, p. 4.
“A Mare’s Nest.” The San Bernardino Daily Times-Index, Thursday, March 15, 1906, p. 7.
O’Hara, Keith. “Dearg Due: An Irish Woman Turned Blood-Thirsty Vampire.” The Irish Road Trip, Saturday, December 30, 2023. https://www.theirishroadtrip.com/dearg-due/
O’Regan, Ann. “The Dearg Dur: The Origin Story of the Waterford Legend.” Irish Central, Wednesday, May 29, 2024. https://www.irishcentral.com/roots/dearg-dur-waterford-legend/
Vronsky, Peter. Female Serial Killers: How and Why Women Become Monsters. New York: Berkley Books, 2007.
“Extract of a Private Letter from Vienna.” The American Weekly Mercury (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania), Sunday, June 8, 1732, p. 2.
Barber, Paul. Vampires, Burial, and Death: Folklore and Reality. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1988.

Sarah A. Peterson-Camachois a library assistant with Fresno County Library, with a Bachelor’s in English and a Bachelor’s in Journalism from California State University, Fresno. In her free time, she makes soap and jewelry that she sells at Fresno-area craft fairs. She has written for The Clovis Roundup and the Central California Paranormal Investigators (CCPI) Newsletter.