By Jarred Marlowe
Halloween has a way of bringing out the unusual, and in the fall of 1989 the Martinsville Bulletin ran a story that was unusual even by Halloween standards. A New York researcher named Stephen Kaplan paid a visit to town with a claim that stopped readers cold. According to his data, Martinsville was home to a real vampire.
Kaplan was not a novelist or a showman. He was a 49-year-old parapsychologist and director of the Vampire Research Center in Elmhurst, New York, and he had spent years building what he considered a serious scientific case for the existence of vampires. He had conducted five worldwide vampire censuses. The most recent, completed in 1988, put the global vampire population at around 500. Three hundred lived in North America. Eight were in Virginia. One was here.
He would not say who. Privacy, he explained, had to be respected even for vampires.
What he would say is that everything most people think they know about vampires is wrong. They do not sleep in coffins. They do not turn into bats. Sunlight does not harm them, and a cross or holy water means nothing to them. They live and work among ordinary people, hold regular jobs, and are largely indistinguishable from their neighbors. Most prefer the night shift if they can get it.
The blood part is real, Kaplan said, but far less dramatic than the movies suggest. A real vampire drinks blood twice a week at most, just a few ounces at a time, and usually from someone willing. A spouse, a close friend, someone who understands the situation.
Vampirism, in Kaplan’s view, is simply a biological condition. A person is born a vampire. They are not made by a bite, and there is nothing supernatural about them. He compared their longevity to progeria, a rare disease that causes children to age at ten times the normal rate. If biology can accelerate aging that dramatically, he argued, it stands to reason it could slow aging just as dramatically. By his math, a vampire might live to 350 years old.
He did offer one word of caution. Every vampire, he said, carries a deep instinct toward violence. Most keep it under control. A few do not, and those are the ones who cause trouble.
Kaplan was also watching a trend that concerned him. People bitten by vampires were beginning to show vampire-like traits, even though he maintained the condition was something you had to be born with, not something that could be passed along. He did not yet know what it meant, but he planned to find out before his self-imposed retirement deadline of the year 2000. Why retire at all, for a man who called himself the world’s only vampire scientist? “When you’re 60 years old,” he said, “you need to find something else to do besides hunt vampires.”
The Bulletin ran the story on October 31, 1989, and it is safe to say it made for memorable breakfast reading that Halloween morning. Whether Martinsville’s unnamed vampire is still among us, presumably well past middle age by now, is a question the census data cannot answer.
But the next time you notice a neighbor who keeps odd hours and seems remarkably well-preserved, well — Kaplan would probably tell you to keep an open mind.
Jarred Marlowe is a local resident and historian. He is a member of the Col. George Waller Chapter of the Sons of the American Revolution, the Blue & Gray Education Society, and the committee chair for the Martinsville-Henry County 250 Committee. He may be reached at marloweja15@gmail.com.
