As Halloween looms, Steve Pratt learns from a Durham University academic that the word on vampires is these bloodsuckers can be traced back to harmless butterflies.

HALLOWEEN. A time for playing trick or treat and dressing up as your favourite monster or ghastly creature. Perhaps a witch, Frankinstein’s monster or a ghost. This year, expect a lot more Draculas with fangs and cloaks on the streets because vampires are in.

They are flavour of the month thanks to an avalanche of films, books and TV shows such as Twilight, True Blood and The Vampire Diaries.

You can’t move for these fanged fiends, immortalised on film by the likes of Christopher Lee and Bela Lugosi.

At this time of year, Durham University senior lecturer Dr Andrej Petrovic, from the department of classics and ancient history, usually regales his students with tales of the unexpected.

But this Greek historian isn’t so much interested in what vampires get up to as the origin of their name. And he’s concluded that, thanks to a cultural misunderstanding, the harmless butterfly has been transformed into one of horror’s most feared creations, the vampire.

Vampires are bloodsuckers, demons of the night – all tied in with the idea that the deceased can return from the dead and feed on the living.

The word vampire doesn’t appear until the 18th Century – in an official report published on January 26, 1732, Dr Petrovic explains. This followed a series of incidents in a village on the border of Serbia and Kosovo, very close to the territories of the Austrian Empire.

“Some strange stories reached the Austrian court and they weren’t sure what was going on,” he explains.

“A peasant falls off a wagon and dies. He is buried, then starts visiting people of the village.

The peasants are obviously upset by this and find that his body in the grave is almost intact.

“So they stab him with a stake and decapitate him. Those are the motifs you hear in lots of vampire stories.”

A delegation of well-educated and skilled men, including doctors, was sent from Austria to the area to check out what was happening in the light of reports of similar occurrences of people coming back from the dead.

“The official report is still available in Vienna telling of the things seen and the things found. They vouched for the claims of the peasants and that the bodies weren’t in a state of decay.

“This is the first record of the word vampire and they did note they existed, which is interesting because it’s a very official document.”

People became obsessed with the notion of vampires, although the idea of the living dead was present in pretty much every religion.

“There were 15 dissertations written in Austria.

This was one of the hottest topics – everyone was writing about vampires,” says Dr Petrovic.

Books stoked the interest in the subject, including John Polidori’s 1819 novella The Vampyre and eventually Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula, which brought the bloodsucker to Whitby and established the vampire formula that still exists today.

Where the word vampire comes from is a completely different issue, according to Dr Petrovic. He believes its roots are much older than generally believed.

It could have something to do with Greek religious belief about “animals of the soul”, one of which was a butterfly.

“There was a Greek belief that when a person dies, his soul leaves the body in the form of an animal – a bird, a snake and, what’s interesting for us, a butterfly. It’s an interesting notion because some of these butterflies were called lampyris.

“What I guess is that there’s some sort of conflation of the idea of a demon that sucks out blood and a soul that leaves the body at night.”

He says that through misunderstanding of its meaning and phonetic changes over time, the term seems to have evolved into vampiris, and in English eventually as vampire.

The old etymology of the word vampire has not been challenged and there are very few papers on the topic, says Dr Petrovic, a Serbian citizen born in Croatia who taught in Munich and Heidelberg before joining Durham classics and ancient history department in 2006.

“In order to investigate the etymology of the word, you need to know Serbo-Croatian and I am, perchance, one of those who understands the language.

“The theory is not widely accepted because it’s not widely known.”

Those hooked on the current fad for all things vampirish won’t care so much about the origins of the word as the way the idea of the living dead is being exploited on the screen and in books.

“Vampires are very much part of popular culture with things like True Blood and Twilight.

You take a look at them and begin wondering how come they’re so popular? I think it’s to do with the romantic notion of threat.

“I see it as a sort of romantic movement, an alternative view to evoke more romantic times and innocence in an age so strong with sex and violence.”

British actor Stephen Moyer, who plays the 173-year-old vampire Bill in the US TV series True Blood, points out that most vampires come from a time, certainly from the gothic romance novel point of view, when men were far more courteous and manners were very much at the forefront of society.

“They treat women with respect and yet they have a power and a strength and masculinity that is perhaps lacking in modern society.

“It is about being treated really nicely, but possibly being able to be taken at any point. It is a very attractive mix between good and bad and it’s dark, twisted and sexy.”