Have We Been Misinformed About Vampires? - Vampires 101

Going on the hypothesis that vampires in the mythological sense actually exist, is it possible they they have misinformed us to keep people from hunting and killing them, and to allow them to exist in our society?

In an early episode of the popular HBO series True Blood, Bill Compton and Sookie Stackhouse have a conversation about the truth as it relates to vampires. Bill stated that humans were misinformed to protect vampires from danger. If vampires are really among us, do you think they've been misinforming us?

It actually makes a lot of sense if you think about it. Consider how much danger it can put a person in to admit that they're homosexual or transsexual. It's often safer to hide what you are, and lead people to believe something else, thereby allowing you to live some semblance of a normal life. It would make perfect sense for vampires to misdirect us to maintain their own safety.

Can you imagine what it would be like if there were easy ways to tell if someone was a vampire, or even test for it? Maybe they've lead us to believe that they react badly to silver and holy water so that if we splash someone or press silver to them and they have no reaction we'd think they must be human. Maybe they've created stories of vampires having no reflection so if we stick a mirror in their face we won't think they're the walking undead.

Many of the myths and legends surrounding vampires make little or no sense, and could easily have been made up by real vampires to throw people off. Being confined to darkness, having an aversion to garlic, being OCD about counting seeds and other such stories could have been the result of strange superstition or deliberate misinformation.

If you believe that mythological vampires exist, it would be very sensible for them to fill people's brains with all these ideas over the ages to protect the safety of their race. My earlier examples are good ones, as no real vampire would want people to know their actual weaknesses and telltale signs. After ages of reinforcement through literature and film, there are things people now accept as absolute truth about vampires.

Case in point, lots of vampire aficionados were up in arms over the movie Twilight. "Real Vampires Don't Sparkle" has become a catch-phrase, even adorning the fronts of t-shirts and bumper stickers. People were also upset with the Twilight vampires' ability to walk in the daylight. I have seen similar unhappy comments about the new ABC series The Gates, where a liberal slathering of sunscreen allows the area's vamps to enjoy daytime social activities. But we all know vamps are creatures of the night, right?

Perhaps we don't know nearly as much as we think we do about what vampires really are and what their weaknesses are. We all know that there are RLVs living among us (Real Living Vampires), but for all we know, the mythological vampires are out there too, walking among us, enjoying the centuries of misinformation they've fed us that allow them to exist alongside us completely unnoticed.