The roots of werewolf and vampire legends go deep into the human past. Some of the earliest known folklore traditions of tribal people feature blood-drinking beasts, animated corpses, and shape-shifting monsters. Beginning as oral traditions passed down from generation to generation around the fireside, some of the first written tales of vampires and werewolves come from the ancient civilizations of Egypt, the Near East, Classical Greece, and Rome. From translations of these ancient texts come some of the most frightening first-hand accounts and eerie mythological tales the world has ever known. Bloodthirsty gods bent on destruction, the unquiet dead seeking vengeance from their tombs, and jackal-headed demons from the underworld—from the beginning of time, they walked among us!

Monsters and shape-shifters have always held a special fascination in mythologies, legends, and folklore the world over. From ancient customs to famous cases of beasts and vampires and their reflections in popular culture, 600 entries provide definitions, explanations, and lists of suggested further reading.

*Includes pictures *Includes excerpts of medieval accounts People have always been afraid of the dead. Since the dawn of humanity, people have both cared for those who have deceased yet also tried to keep them away. There are a myriad of legends and beliefs about the dead coming back, and one of the more persistent ones is of the vampire. Werewolves have long been a staple of popular culture. In the 19th century and 20th century, there were countless books, plays, and films about people who turned into wolves or wolf like humanoids and went on rampages. The figure of the werewolf is so familiar that people across the world are familiar with the folklore, and the beliefs that they transform during a full moon, can only be stopped with silver, and transmit their disease by biting their victims. In fact, those beliefs were not originally part of werewolf folklore, but later embellishments by artists. The belief in lycanthropy is far older and more complex than most people suspect, dating all the way back to antiquity, and werewolves were once assumed to be very real. Indeed, people were even put on trial and executed because the courts of law were convinced they could change their form and kill innocent people. For thousands of years, werewolves have represented a strange and ancient tradition that still echoes through culture to this day. Likewise, while everyone has heard of vampires, few people are truly familiar with the history and folklore that have made the mythical beings so popular. Indeed, there are so many legends from so many cultures that it is difficult to come up with a hard definition, and folklore is by its very nature unscientific, but most people in the Western world think of vampires as those who come back from the grave to suck the blood or life essence from the living. This common understanding of vampires actually obscures many European and most non-European traditions of bloodsucking monsters. For example, in China, Japan, and the Middle East, there are spirits that will drain the life force of an unwary person, but these magical beings were never mortal humans. In African and Native American traditions, there are monsters that do the same, but while they are supposed to be of this Earth, they too are not human beings. Furthermore, folklore changes over time, so the vampires people are familiar with today (and the ones some people claim to actually meet) bear little resemblance to the vampires of early modern Europe. Vampires and Werewolves: The Legends and Folk Tales about History's Most Notorious Mythical Beings chronicles how ancient stories about these mysterious supernatural beings became popular and affected history. Along with pictures and a bibliography, you will learn about vampires and werewolves like never before.

Gloomy old castles, desecrated tombs in the crypts of ruined churches, battlefields strewn with corpses, and the moon rising over the moors—Old Europe was the perfect setting for the myths and legends of the undead and the beast that howls in the night. It is from the folklore of Europe that much of our tradition of vampires and werewolves originates. Living with the bloody realities of ethnic and religious warfare and the terror of death by plague and starvation, Old Europeans saw the world around them as a battleground of good and evil, where beings under the control of Satan threatened them on all sides. Some of the best-known vampire lore, like the tale of the nightmarish Count Dracula, was based on the lives of actual Europeans who were so brutal and so violent that they can only be described as human monsters. From the deep recesses of Old Europe come many of the stories that still thrill and frighten us in the twenty-first century.

For centuries, folk tales about vampires, werewolves, zombies and the undead have captivated and spooked children. Vampires, Werewolves & Zombies collects 40 mythical characters from American, European, African, Chinese and Arabian folklore, ranging from such well known literary examples as Bram Stoker’s Dracula to Vulkodlak, a werewolf.

The lusty vampire, the sympathetic werewolf, the tragic banshee are just a few of the dark and frightening creatures you'll discover in Banshees, Werewolves, Vampires, and Other Creatures of the Night. Huffington Post Weird News columnist and author Varla Ventura takes readers on a wild ride through the shadowy hills of rural Ireland, the dark German forests, and along abandoned farms and country roads across the world to discover some of the most frightening and freaktacular tales, tidbits, and encounters with all those beasties that go bump in the night. Along with classic pieces from Bram Stoker, Elliot O'Donnell, Sabine BaringGould, William Butler Yeats and many others, Ventura includes: • Famous vampires you may not know • The identity of the author of the first English vampire novel (and his relationship to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein) • Excerpts from the first psychic vampire novel ever written • Stories of 19th century werewolf hunters • Why banshees are the most feared of supernatural creatures

From the steaming jungles of the Amazon, to the ice-bound Arctic, the Sonora Desert, and the dark forests of the Appalachian Mountains—North, Central, and South America have their own unique varieties of vampires and shape-shifting man-beasts. A rich tradition of frightening myths and ghastly folk tales going back centuries before the Europeans came to the New World, blending with the folklore of newer immigrants, and rising like an eerie mist from the fertile mix of American cultures, our part of the world has no shortage of blood-drinking monsters and werewolves. Native Americans told tales of night-stalking corpses rising from their graves, the Ancient Aztecs with their blood-soaked cosmology left a legacy of terror tales to modern Mexico, and the howling of wolves (or is it the loup garou?) still pierces the bitter Quebec night.