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The Vampire individual is the first romantic. Paradoxically, too, he's the last grade of romanticism.
As a vampire he's able to listen to the murmur of the world: the night glowing in an almost maddening intensity; the mess of the insect over a leaf can be heard while the statue seems to blink.

The vampire is extremely sensitive. The world of the living is too heavy for him, annihilating. That's why he turns off, why he hides. He's a fobic. Only an intense hunger can force him to go out.

As the vampire flick Twilight tops the U.S. charts and opens in Britain, female viewers are swooning over the impossible romance between mortal and immortal. But many of their male companions will be pondering the age-old question: "Just what kind of hardware do I need to take down that sucker?" 

A 4000-year-old "vampire" grave, believed to be the world's first burial place for one of the presumed "undead", has been discovered in eastern Europe. It bares spookily similar hallmarks to Celtic tombs in the British Isles designed to prevent bloodsucking "revenants". These were recently buried people who were believed to rise from the grave, walk the earth and prey on the living.

First, I think it best to define the essence of the vampire (fictional) before attempting to define the Essence of the Vampyre (magical). In this way, I hope to invite discussion and/or debate on the topic, and to hear from other magicians' experience with this type of magic.

"Would you consider putting that mad lamp with the naked man in the corner?" David Mlinaric, the doyen of interior decorators, has come to Transylvania. Jessica Douglas-Home, champion of Romanian culture, shuffles a 19th-century ambassador's uniform to the appointed position.

All countries have their heroes. Romania's most celebrated are the two princes of Wallachia who battled the Ottoman empire. The first is Michael the Brave who reigned from 1558 until his assassination in 1601.

A Dhampir in Balkan folklore is the child of a vampire father and a human mother, with vampire powers but none of the weaknesses. A dhampir is believed to have the unique ability to see vampires, even when these are invisible, and is unusually adept at killing them.

On Dominica there exists a creature known as the soucoyan. The "official" explanation of this creature's origin is that it is a curious combination of West African spiritualism and 18th Century Catholicism.