How To Kill Vampires

Legends tell of vampire as the ‘un-dead’, the creatures which perpetually hover between the states of existence and death at the same time. The origins of the vampire are shrouded in myth and mystery.

Apart from the fact that no one is sure if they actually exist or not, we don’t even know who started the legend of their existence. Some say that the prototype for wickedness, Cain the son of Adam who killed his brother was the original vampire; there are others who claim that after Judas Iscariot betrayed Jesus Christ, he became the original vampire, being banished from the ranks of the alive.

However the first incarnation of the literal modern-day vampire was done by Bram Stoker in his legendary novel “Dracula”. Count Dracula as depicted in this book is the loner who inhabits a castle and slips out to suck people’s blood at night.

The basic virtues of a vampire are these:

Vampires are usually thought to inhabit graveyards. It is said that to identify a vampire’s grave, a young boy had to be lead across a graveyard on a stallion and at the grave where the horse stopped short in fright, was situated the vampire’s lair.

Although it is just a legend, vampires are thought to be slightly bloated in appearance with pale slightly grayish skin due to the absence of blood in their bodies.

It is also said that a vampire has no reflection in a mirror and it is a common method to identify it. Vampires are also thought to be afraid of the light and they prefer darker shadows and that is the main reason they only appear at night.

So what do you do if a real-life vampire is stalking you?

The answers are many and vary in complexity and difficulty. Everywhere from movies to books, there are hundred of ways to kill a vampire. In the Anne rice vampire chronicles, she says that in order to kill a vampire you first had to burn it and then scatter its ashes so that another vampire may not be able to resurrect it.

The stories of Christopher Pike tell something else. There are movies that mock at all the conventional methods of killing vampires and each movie comes up with its own unique breed of vampires that have to be killed a certain way. So what does one do? Do you burn it? Behead it? Scare it with a crucifix? 

Here are some of the main ways to kill them off for good:

Drive A Wooden Spear Through Its Heart

This happens to be the most trusted and fool-proof methods of killing a vampire( that is if your vampire doesn’t happen to one of those mutants; in that case it’ll just take the stake out and laugh at your stupidity).

It is said that the most potent woods from which the spear should be made are ash, hawthorn and oak and it had to pierce all the way through the heart.

Another way to kill a vampire: simply incinerate it.

It is said that you should burn a vampire’s body to the point that only the ashes remain and after that you can either scatter these ashes in various locations or simply bury these ashes.

Burning the bodies is one of the acts that has been most exploited way of killing a vampire. Though it is a method to kill the ever-present blood sucker, years have seen innocents die at the hand of ignorant authorities.

The medieval times saw people who had chosen to go against the teachings of the church suffer this type of death after they were labeled as vampire and burned in mass witch hunting and vampire slayings.

This was another not-so-common method to destroy a vampire. It is said that to effectively kill it one had to pour boiling water in its grave and additional measures were also taken.

These included pouring of holy water over the body and putting garlic in these ruined graves.

The advent of the fire-arm brought another addition to the plethora of vampire hunting methods. It is said that vampires can be effectively killed if a bullet is put through their hearts.

This method has been depicted in many horror movies which show the vampire perishing at the hand of the hero when he shoots a bullet through the creature’s heart.

However, in the 19^th century it was believed that a vampire should be shot through the coffin and after that its body should be dismembered and cut up and in some cases it should be burned and the ashes scattered for full measure.

These are just some of the most common methods used in fiction literature and history to get rid of these evil creatures. But the world is still not short on ideas of how to go about finishing them off.

Each new production on TV and cinema bring with it another fascinating method for its killing. But the strangest thing is, man will never get enough of the vampire.

We watch movies and read books about it, the recent Twilight Book and movie craze is testament to that.The aura of mystery and sexuality surrounding the character of vampires still remains intact after centuries.