ELISABETH
WYNHAUSEN in New
York
(Investigator
31, 1993
July.
Reprinted
with permission from The Advertiser – March 14, 1987)
DR STEPHEN
Kaplan met me
in a coffee shop
at an anonymous intersection of Queens, New York.
He was cautious
about
having strangers over
to his house, he said, because in his line of work he ran into some
very
weird people. "Murderers, psychopaths, blood cultists, vampiroids,
degenerates...last
year I got fan mail from a werewolf in Georgia…"
Kaplan is
founder and
director of the Vampire
Research Centre in Elmhurst, New York. Not only are there vampires,
actual
vampires, he said, but he has met a number of them.
For the record,
they
neither slept in coffins
nor turned into bats at night. "Vampires are not immortal either, but
they
do live a long time."
At first glance,
Kaplan is
not someone you
would associate with so singular an interest. On the plump side, he was
dressed in a three-piece suit and a darkish striped tie. But on his
left
hand was a silver ring, a gargoyle that you could have seen from across
the street. The ring is a good-luck token that a vampire gave him.
"Vampires like
me," said
Kaplan, "they like
my sense of humor."
But no, he is
not putting
the rest of us
on. If anything, he was doggedly earnest. Indeed, if you listen to him
long enough you almost start to think of vampires as people with this,
uh, quirk. Some people like getting dressed up in rubber, some people
are
exhibitionists and some will, well, bite you in the neck.
Take "Mrs X", a
vampire
from California he
interviewed not long ago. "Her children were aware that she was a
vampire,
but she didn't drink blood in front of them."
Didn't the kids
have a
problem with the,
uh, concept? "Well, it depends on the age," said Kaplan seriously. "If
you're told when you're two or three years old, maybe by the time
you're
a teenager, you're getting used to the idea that Mommy is a little
different."
Maybe. Not that
Kaplan
himself stumbled into
vampirology that way. "It started, I guess, as a youngster, listening
to
radio raconteurs discuss such bizarre things as abominable snowmen and
UFOs..."
Classed as
intellectually
impaired as a child,
he was to catch up in the end, overcompensate, even, going to college
for
years and years, until he had degrees in this and degrees in that.
Intrigued by
para-psychology, he gave countless
classes in extra-sensory perception, telepathy and the rest of it.
Since founding
the Vampire
Research Centre
15 years ago, he has compiled the only "vampire census" ever taken.
"There are about
500
vampires worldwide,"
he said, "and we've heard from several vampires in Australia.
These days,
fewer and
fewer vampires seem
to respect the traditions. Count Dracula’s nip on the neck, it turns
out,
may even be a bit old-fashioned.
VAMPIRES find
volunteers.
They hang around
with "blood cultists" or people who practise witchcraft.
"Mrs X had
paramours who
would accept the
love bites, as she called them, but vampires will use syringes, razor
blades,
small knives..."
"Hold it right
there," I
told Kaplan, "I'm
squeamish." "Well, make sure you're not the victim, heh heh."
But Kaplan is
dead serious
about the "science"
of vampirology. "We're no fly-by-night outfit," he said, "and we
separate
the facts from the fiction."
Not everyone is
quite
convinced.
The Bela Lugosi
image of
the vampire is "pure
mythology", said Paul Kurtz, chairman of the Committee for the
Scientific
Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP). "On the other hand,
there are people who have a penchant for tasting blood. Some people are
sexually aroused by drinking it."
CSICOP "debunks
claims"
about the supernatural.
Its executive director is Australian Mark Plummer, who used to be a
lawyer
in Melbourne.
Questioned about
the
existence of vampires
he seemed to have trouble keeping a straight face. "This is an issue we
can sink our teeth into," he said. "Still, I feel there's more chance
of
being mugged than bitten in the neck."
Other than
investigating
them, Kaplan has
no truck with vampires. "Some people in the business are vampires
themselves,"
he went on. "They lose that objectivity."
Little irritates
him as
much as "the crackpots"
who muscle in on his turf. "Look at this," he said, showing me a story
from the National
Enquirer.
The story was
about a
"famed psychic researcher"
called Eddy Warren. "Year before, last, this guy found 150-year-old
dead
vampires coming back to attack people in Vermont. Then he sent out a
Press
release about levitating Cabbage Patch dolls. The guy's a quack. Just
look
at this story..."
To be honest, I
was still
staring at the
photograph. It showed the famed psychic researcher, a middle-aged,
double-chinned
man in a sober suit and spectacles, holding a crucifix over a Cabbage
Patch
doll that was floating above its crib.
Talk about a
picture being
worth a thousand
words, even if the story itself said that one of the Cabbage Patch
dolls
possessed by demons had tried to choke its owner.
"I mean, can you
believe
that they'd give
this guy publicity?"
"I'd believe
anything," I
said.
–The
Age