the history of some monsters

To finish out my treatise on favorite horror stories I wanted to talk about the possible reasons for these thoughts and ideas having come up in the first place. Zombies are actually a religious expression from the voodoo religion. They would drug people and put them into trances and those people would have exhibited all the tendencies of a dead man. So that is actually a normal idea. The original zombies however would not have more than a passing resemblance to current ones. They were hypnotized or drugged people who were under the control of, often unscrupulous, voodoo practitioners. Vampires and werewolves were an attempt to figure out the vagaries of human kind and they also might have had something to do with the deficiencies in medical knowledge of the day. There were times when people were buried before they were REALLY dead. As miracle max put it they were only mostly dead. Sometimes peoples bodies were misdiagnosed as being dead. In fact a lot of our tradition today comes from that fact. The viewing of the body, the Irish wake these are reflections of those times. Also many of our phrases come from that time too. Like graveyard shift, or saved by the bell. The graveyard shift, and saved by the bell both come from how people were sometimes buried alive. At some point people realized that people were not always dead when they went into that hole. In order to make sure only the dead were truly buried they would leave a hole in the coffin top and tie a string to the finger of the body. After tying that to a bell above ground, if the body moved the bell would ring and so they could be saved by the ringing of that little bell. But in order to hear it sometimes you had to have someone on duty late at night in the graveyard to listen for that bell. Thus graveyard shift. By the way, Ghouls were people who would dig up corpses for the money they might be able to get from stealing from the bodies. Hmm maybe that was how they found out that some of the dead weren’t really dead when they were buried… Anyway now you know… if you want to know more there is lots of research out there to look into.