Someone might become a donor for a number of reasons – from being a close friend of the vampire, to doing it for money and even sexual favours – and health checks on both sides are customary. Being “awakened” and “coming out of the coffin” are ways to talk about becoming aware of one’s vampiric identity. To “feed” is to drink blood, while those who give blood are called “donors”. And the community has adopted terms to describe their unorthodox habits. Some simply derive strength from the “psychic energy” of others. Not every vampire must drink blood to survive (those who do are called “sanguinarians”). You might bite a lip, for instance, and realise that swallowing blood gives you a burst of energy. They usually discover accidentally that blood offers a remedy. At least, they weren’t any crazier than your Average Joe.”Īccording to Browning, symptoms manifest around puberty, when those who later become reliant on blood find themselves physically “drained”. But, he says: “After a short period, I realised that they weren’t crazy. These communities have kept largely to themselves, avoiding prying eyes. Of America’s estimated 5,000 vampires, Browning says about 50 live in New Orleans – a figure corroborated by the sociologist DJ Williams of Idaho University. But his scepticism waned after he embarked on a class project that would turn into five years of field study in the French Quarter. Her teeth had been filed to a point, like fangs.īrowning, who has spent his entire academic life studying the depiction of vampires in film and literature, originally thought that there must be something deranged about real people who identify with such characters. Did she know anyone who fitted that description? The woman smiled, and Browning had his answer. Members of this community have chosen to identify themselves as “vampires” in defiance of the label’s negative images. To be clear, these aren’t people who possess the supernatural powers that we associate with the likes of Count Dracula, but rather individuals who claim to have a medical condition that requires them to drink blood (human or animal) to sustain themselves. Nervously, Browning approached her and started talking to her about his ethnographic study of “real vampires”. This woman, he motioned, was one of the people Browning was looking for. He was talking to the owner of Wicked Orleans, in New Orleans’s French Quarter, when a middle-aged woman walked through the door. A doctoral candidate at Louisiana State University at the time, he had already been on the hunt for several months. John Edgar Browning met his first “real vampire” in a Gothic clothes store.

True blood drink