The real mystery about vampires

What's the origin of the word "vampire"? Depending on where you look it up, it comes from French, Serbo-Croatian, Turkish, Hungarian, an ancestral Slavic language...in other words, no one's sure. Most Slavic languages have a word that resembles vampire (vampir, upir, upior,etc.), which, in turn, resembles the Turkic ubyr ("witch"). "Vampire" first appeared in English in 1745, in a travelogue titled Travels of Three English Gentlemen. But stories about vampire-like creatures are thousands of years old.

books & authors, names of things

Books

• Vampires
  Vampires in literature, film, history, and the animal world
• Wempires
  a lighter take on vampires

Websites

• Vampiri Europeana
  A Bibliography of Non-English European Resources on Vampires in Literature, Folklore, and Popular Culture

Websites

• Wikipedia
  Vampires
• BBC America
  History of movie vampires

Last updated by curious on Oct. 24, 2009

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While the Library has verified the information presented in these files in what it considers to be reliable and authoritative sources, it cannot take responsibility for nor guarantee the accuracy of the information presented.