The Dead, the Blood-Drinkers, and the Monsters We Made
Welcome to History After Dark.
The kind of history that didn’t quite make it into your textbooks.
When you hear the word vampire, chances are your brain does not immediately go:
fish.
Fair.
Mine doesn’t either.
We think coffins.
Fangs.
Blood.
People with questionable sleeping schedules and an unhealthy relationship with necks.
The ocean seems like an entirely different category of nightmare.
Except apparently humans have spent centuries looking at the water and deciding:
Nope. Vampires live there too.
Sometimes we imagined the dead climbing back out of it.
Sometimes nature created an animal that literally attaches itself to another creature and drinks its blood.
And sometimes—
we saw something enormous swimming beneath a boat, had absolutely no idea what the hell we were looking at, and decided that Vampire of the Ocean sounded reasonable.
Those are not the same story.
But somehow?
They all lead back to the water.
The Women Who Came Back
Let’s start with the rusalka.
And before we turn her into some generic evil mermaid—
don’t.
Rusalka traditions vary considerably across Slavic regions, which means there isn’t one tidy little description we can slap onto all of them and call it finished.
In many traditions, though, rusalki were associated with water and with the dead.
Some accounts described them as the spirits of drowned women.
Others connected them with young women who died by suicide, people who suffered what communities considered an “unclean” death, or even dead children.
They might appear beautiful.
Young.
Long-haired.
Sitting beside rivers or lakes.
Which sounds lovely right up until the part where some stories have them luring men toward the water, pulling them beneath it, or inviting them into dances that ended with the victim being tickled to death.
Yes.
Tickled.
To death.
Apparently drowning was not dramatic enough.
But rusalki matter here for a reason beyond being creepy.
They represent one of the oldest fears humans have attached to water:
what if the people it takes don’t stay gone?
A drowning already leaves questions.
Sometimes there is no body.
No grave.
No final moment anyone witnesses.
The person simply disappears beneath the surface.
And folklore has always been very good at filling empty spaces.
The Man With Seaweed for a Head
Norway had its own version of the dead refusing to stay politely dead.
The draug—or draugen—was originally a broader kind of revenant: a dead person who returned to trouble the living.
Later Norwegian folklore tied the creature much more closely to the sea.
The draug became the ghost of someone who had drowned and never received a proper Christian burial.
Seeing or hearing one could supposedly warn that somebody else was going to die.
And in some stories?
It did more than warn you.
It tried to drag you into the sea with it.
Descriptions could get wonderfully horrible.
A fisherman’s clothes.
A half-boat.
And instead of a normal head—
a tangled mass of seaweed.
Because apparently Scandinavian folklore looked at a drowned ghost and thought:
You know what would improve this?
Kelp.
Neither the rusalka nor the draug is a vampire in the neat Dracula sense.
They aren’t necessarily running around looking for blood.
But they belong to the same much older family of fears:
the restless dead.
The thing that should have crossed from living to dead—
but didn’t stay there.
And then nature went ahead and created something much closer to an actual aquatic vampire.
The One That Actually Drinks Blood
Meet the sea lamprey.
Do not be fooled by the eel-looking body.
It is not an eel.
And the mouth is where things get rude.
Sea lampreys don’t have jaws like most fish.
Instead, they have a round sucking disc filled with sharp, horn-like teeth and a rasping tongue.
They attach themselves to another fish.
Hold on.
Rasp through the scales and skin.
And then feed on the victim’s blood and other body fluids.
They also produce a substance that helps prevent the blood from clotting while they eat.
So if you were waiting for one creature in this article to earn the vampire title honestly—
congratulations.
We found it.
Sea lampreys are native to the Atlantic Ocean, where they evolved alongside their hosts. In the Great Lakes, however, they became invasive and devastated important fish populations after spreading through shipping canals during the twentieth century. The Great Lakes Fishery Commission still maintains a major control program because of the damage they can cause.
And because apparently one genuine aquatic blood-drinker wasn’t enough—
there are also leeches.
Some blood-feeding leeches slice or pierce the skin and use anticoagulants to keep blood flowing while they feed.
The fun twist?
The exact ability that makes them disgusting to most of us is also why medicinal leeches still have a place in modern reconstructive medicine.
They can help relieve pooled blood after procedures such as finger reattachments and skin grafts.
So yes.
Sometimes the vampire helps put your finger back on.
History and biology are weird.
The Vampire That Wasn’t a Vampire
And now we get to my favorite part.
Because in the nineteenth century, people started calling something a vampire that—
as far as blood-drinking goes—
was innocent.
In 1823, American naturalist Samuel L. Mitchill examined an enormous ray captured near Delaware Bay.
The animal entered scientific literature under the name:
Cephalopterus vampyrus.
The Vampire of the Ocean.
Today, that old scientific name is treated as a synonym of Mobula birostris, the giant oceanic manta ray.
And manta rays do not suck blood.
They do not hunt sailors.
They are not lurking beneath ships waiting to drag screaming fishermen into the abyss.
But imagine seeing one in the early nineteenth century without the benefit of marine biology documentaries.
A massive dark body.
Enormous wing-like fins.
Strange projections around the head.
Something capable of moving with tremendous force through water you cannot see through.
People called them devil-fish.
Mitchill gave one a vampire name.
And humans did what humans have always done when something in the ocean looked enormous and unfamiliar.
We added a monster.
Devil-Fishing
A few decades later, South Carolina planter and sportsman William Elliott wrote at length about hunting these enormous rays in Carolina Sports by Land and Water.
He called them devil-fish.
He also repeated Mitchill’s “Vampire of the Ocean” name, connecting it in part with the creature’s broad, bat-like “wings.”
Elliott described hunting parties going out in small boats armed with harpoons, rope, and lances.
Once struck, a giant ray could tow the boat across the water at terrifying speed.
In one account, Elliott described being carried roughly twenty-five miles over the course of the chase.
Which is basically nineteenth-century waterskiing—
except your motor is an enormous pissed-off manta ray with a harpoon stuck in it.
Hard pass.
There’s another part of these stories that deserves to stay visible.
Much of the dangerous work involved enslaved Black watermen whose boating skill, strength, and experience Elliott relied upon and sometimes praised while simultaneously owning people within the society that produced these accounts.
That matters.
Because it is very easy to turn old hunting narratives into colorful adventure stories and quietly remove the people whose labor made those adventures possible.
We’re not doing that.
And the more these rays appeared in hunting stories, newspapers, and popular accounts, the easier it became for the animal itself to blur into something monstrous.
Huge.
Powerful.
Mysterious.
A devil.
A vampire.
Never mind that it wasn’t actually hunting us.
Galveston Gets a Sea Monster
Then, in 1885, Galveston, Texas got one of its own.
On August 1, The Galveston Daily News devoted part of its front page to a captured creature under the headline:
“THE CEPHALOPTERA.”
Underneath came an even better description:
“THE CAPTIVE MONSTER FISH THE SENSATION OF THE HOUR.”
The animal had reportedly become a public spectacle near the Beach Hotel.
Crowds came to see it.
The paper discussed the animal under the old Cephaloptera vampyrus / devil-fish terminology and described Galveston as being fascinated by the enormous creatures seen in local waters.
And I love this part of the story because by then the monster had basically completed its transformation.
There was a real animal.
A very large one.
There were scientific names.
Hunting stories.
Newspaper stories.
Fearful swimmers.
Crowds gathering around the body.
And wrapped around all of it—
vampire.
Not because it drank blood.
Because it looked like something that deserved a story.
Meanwhile, in Hell…
There is one more ocean vampire that deserves an honorable mention.
The vampire squid.
Its scientific name is:
Vampyroteuthis infernalis.
Which translates roughly to:
vampire squid from Hell.
That is an aggressively dramatic name for an animal whose diet largely consists of marine snow—bits of drifting organic material falling through the deep ocean.
This thing was named like it rises from the abyss to consume the souls of drowned sailors.
Meanwhile it is basically floating around eating underwater crumbs.
Its dark coloring, huge eyes, deep-sea habitat, and cloak-like webbing between the arms earned it the vampire look.
The blood drinking?
Again—
not so much.
What We Know
We know that several very different traditions and animals have been pulled into the idea of an aquatic vampire.
Rusalki appear in varied Slavic traditions as dangerous water-associated spirits, often connected with troubling or untimely deaths.
Later Norwegian folklore tied the draug especially closely to people who drowned at sea and returned as dangerous revenants.
Sea lampreys genuinely feed on blood and body fluids and use specialized anatomy to remain attached to host fish.
Some leeches also feed directly on blood.
And nineteenth-century naturalists and writers really did use vampire and devil-fish terminology for enormous rays that we now recognize as manta rays.
We also know that Cephalopterus vampyrus, Mitchill’s old name, is no longer the accepted scientific name. Modern taxonomy places it under the giant oceanic manta ray, Mobula birostris.
What We Don’t Know
Folklore is messy.
Rusalki were not described identically everywhere.
Neither were draugen.
Stories change as they move from one village to another, one storyteller to another, and one century to another.
We cannot identify one moment when humanity collectively decided that water needed undead monsters.
It didn’t happen that way.
We also have to be careful with nineteenth-century sea-monster accounts.
Measurements could be exaggerated.
Stories were repeated.
Scientific naming was still changing.
Popular writers borrowed dramatic language from one another.
And the giant rays described as vampires were real animals surrounded by stories that could become significantly less biological every time someone retold them.
What Probably Happened
There was never one single thing called the vampire of the sea.
There were several ideas that happened to meet in the same dark water.
Human beings have always feared drowning.
So cultures imagined the drowned returning.
Human beings fear blood being taken from the body.
Nature gave us lampreys and leeches that actually do exactly that.
And human beings are extremely good at turning unfamiliar animals into monsters.
So nineteenth-century sailors and naturalists looked at enormous rays gliding beneath their boats and gave them names like:
devil-fish.
Vampire of the Ocean.
The strange thing is that the real animals rarely needed our help being interesting.
A lamprey already has a circular mouth packed with teeth.
A manta ray can stretch wider than a person is tall several times over.
A vampire squid lives thousands of feet beneath the surface and can release glowing material when threatened.
That is already cool as hell.
But humans looked at the ocean and did what we always do.
We filled in the parts we couldn’t see.
Maybe that’s the real connection between every creature and legend in this story.
The ocean hides things from us.
Bodies disappear into it.
Animals rise from beneath the surface before vanishing again.
For most of human history, someone standing on a shoreline had absolutely no idea what was moving underneath all that dark water.
And when we don’t understand something—
we tell stories.
Sometimes we turn the dead into monsters.
Sometimes we turn parasites into vampires.
And sometimes we take a harmless giant ray—
and call it the devil.
Sources & Further Reading
Every History After Dark article is built from multiple sources whenever possible.
This one required a slightly different approach because folklore, nineteenth-century natural history, modern taxonomy, and actual animal biology are not the same kind of evidence.
Folklore sources tell us what people believed and repeated.
Historical sources show us how animals were described at the time.
Modern zoological sources help identify what those animals actually were.
Where versions conflict, I’ve tried to preserve those differences rather than blend them into one cleaner story.
Folklore & Cultural Sources
Encyclopedia of Religion / Encyclopedia.com — Slavic Religion: Rusalkas.
Useful for comparing regional descriptions of rusalki and their associations with water, drowning, untimely death, singing, dancing, and dangerous encounters. Slavic Religion — Encyclopedia.com
Store norske leksikon — Draug.
Used for the Norwegian draug tradition, particularly the later association with drowned people, lack of burial, death omens, and descriptions involving fishermen’s clothing, seaweed, and the half-boat. Draug — Store norske leksikon
Historical Sources
Samuel L. Mitchill — early nineteenth-century descriptions of Cephalopterus vampyrus / the “Vampire of the Ocean.”
Mitchill’s giant ray became one of the historical foundations for the vampire terminology surrounding devil-fish.
William Elliott — Carolina Sports by Land and Water.
Elliott’s nineteenth-century devil-fishing narratives were used for descriptions of giant-ray hunts, the “Vampire of the Ocean” terminology, and the role of enslaved Black watermen in those expeditions.
The Galveston Daily News, August 1, 1885.
The front-page article “The Cephaloptera” described a captured “monster fish” that became a public sensation in Galveston and used the older vampyrus/devil-fish terminology.
The American Cyclopædia — “Devil Fish.”
Useful for seeing how nineteenth-century reference works attempted to separate the real animal from some of the more dramatic monster stories that surrounded it.
Modern Biology & Taxonomy
Great Lakes Fishery Commission — Sea Lamprey.
Used for sea-lamprey anatomy, blood and body-fluid feeding, anticoagulation, and the ecological damage caused by invasive sea lampreys in the Great Lakes. Sea Lamprey — Great Lakes Fishery Commission
World Register of Marine Species — Mobulidae taxonomy.
Used to confirm that Mitchill’s Cephalopterus vampyrus is now treated as a synonym of the giant oceanic manta ray, Mobula birostris. World Register of Marine Species
Smithsonian Institution — Bloodsuckers!
Used for modern information about blood-feeding leeches, anticoagulants, and their continued use in reconstructive medicine. Bloodsuckers! — Smithsonian Institution
NOAA Ocean Service — Vampire Squid.
Used for the wonderfully unfair reality that Vampyroteuthis infernalis does not drink blood and largely feeds on marine snow. Vampire Squid — NOAA Ocean Service
A Note on Sources
Folklore does not behave like a police report.
There is rarely one definitive version.
Stories change by place, language, storyteller, and generation.
So throughout this article, I’ve tried to keep three things separate:
what folklore says,
what historical writers recorded,
and what modern biology can actually demonstrate.
A rusalka does not need to be zoologically real for the stories about her to tell us something about how people understood drowning and death.
A nineteenth-century writer calling a manta ray a vampire does not make the animal bloodthirsty.
And a sea lamprey does not need a cape.
It is already horrifying enough.
History is often stranger than fiction.
See you next Friday.
— Destiny
