by Darryl Wilkinson
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by Darryl Wilkinson
There seems to be a public opinion poll on everything. And yet, I keep looking for some survey from Transylvania about the real question of the day: Do Transylvanians really believe that werewolves and vampires prowl the earth?
You might be surprised at what a professor of folklore reported. He studied folklore in Romania while on a Fulbright fellowship. He says people in Eastern Europe consider werewolves and vampires as a part of nature, a product of the struggle between God and the devil in creating the earth.
In other words, they don’t set much store in the Hollywood depiction of those creatures as murderous ghouls or blood-sucking, sexual marauders. Dr. Harry Senn, a California college teacher who did the study, says Transylvanians just accept stories as a fact of life. “They’re very matter-of-fact,” he writes. “These things can happen and you’ve got to be careful.”
Senn says he talked to four older persons who told him people they knew had been compelled by the call of wolves to run into the forest, strip and turn into wolves before the very eyes of their loved ones. Werewolves occasionally are seen as agents of God sent to punish cattle farmers by eating their herds.
Becoming a vampire, on the other hand, has to do with an accident of death. Some Transylvanians believe in strigoi (dead humans whose spirits aren’t at rest because of improper burial rites). Some Europeans believe the spirit is apt to seep out of the underworld to bedevil old enemies, terrorize farm animals and render fields infertile.
Senn says he was told in Romania that strigoi drink blood but they don’t necessarily bite human necks to get it. Tradition has it that a stake is needed to banish the strigoi for good, but believers hold that the stake must be plunged into the heart through the back, rather than the chest.
So, the results an opinion poll from Transylvania might be surprising. I suspect they’d view the Hollywood versions as immature. And, I’m curious, are people there still talking about what nobody here has seen?