Viergacht

Author's note: this is based heavily on Dr. Anton Vail's books "In the Presence of Vampires", "The Vampire Fallacies" and "The Vail Guide to Vampires", as well as his popular lecture series "Vampires in Myth, Media and Mass Consciousness - Everything you didn't know that you didn't know about the undead". Some of the science has been updated since these were published, but this essay retains Vail's preferred term 'vampire' instead of the more modern 'vyr'. Any schoolchild can recite our culture's basic tenets of vampirism - that the bloodsucking undead sleep in coffins by day because sunlight destroys them, how they can turn into bats and hy