"Real Vampires"- how can this be anything but a contradiction in terms? We all know about vampires. Stock characters of fiction, guaranteed box-office draws, the media vampire has been familiar to us since childhood.

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.

	Dracula Myth author: Gabriel Ronay
	The Truth About Dracula. author: Gabriel Ronay Mass Market Paperback: $2.95

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.

The Shtriga, in Albanian folklore, was a vampiric witch that would suck the blood of infants at night while they slept, and would then turn into a flying insect (traditionally a moth, fly or bee). Only the shtriga herself could cure those she had drained (often by spitting in their mouths), and those who were not cured inevitably sickened and died.