We Can’t Stop Here, This Is Bat Country

Here’s my offer: How would you like to eat insects, carry disease, and sleep suspended above a lake of your own feces? If your answer is “where do I register?” then perhaps the bat is your spirit animal.

Which seems to be true for vampires, since bats have spent the last 100+ years as an alter ego of sorts; the thing that vampires can transform into to easily move about unnoticed. Bats are the Bruce Wayne to, um, Batman.

Bruce Wayne is the one that carries rabies

How did such a foul creature come to besmirch the name of upstanding murderous bloodsuckers, anyway?

I mean, sure, they both have a fondness for night and they are both terrifying to behold. But consider the often-overlooked problem with the connection:

Literary vampires are from Europe, and vampire bats are only found in South America.

I’ve scoured my notes and haven’t found much on vampires importing anything from the Western Hemisphere. So there’s an ocean of “Huh?” between the these two.

Huh Ocean is also called “Atlantic”

Well, maybe it makes a _little_ more sense if we understand the purpose vampires served, traditionally.

There have been a number of vampire scares in world history, and they track alarmingly close with epidemics of disease. Paul Barber goes into this in great detail in his remarkable book Vampires, Burial, and Death.

Barber wasn’t the first to notice this; after all, the word “nosferatu”, so often mistranslated as “vampire”, is actually a Romanian word for “plague-carrier”. F.W. Murnau must have been aware of this; for when he made the film Nosferatu in 1920, he not only set the action in a German city experiencing a plague, but associated his lead character closely with disease-carrying rats.

Possibly because bat-wranglers were harder to come by on a 1920s film set

Since bats, like rats, can carry disease, and folklore vampires were associated with epidemics, it wasn’t so much of a stretch for fiction authors to make a connection. Add in the nocturnal nature of both creatures, a tendency to live in decrepit castles/caves, with a side of blood drinking and you get a literary slam dunk.

Never mind that vampire bats are on a different continent than vampires.

So if you are about to pass on a long distance relationship because you don’t know how to make it work from three states away, remember that vampires and their kindred bats made it work — and vampires can’t even skype.

Call the exterminator, that Bruce Wayne carries the plague!

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Image credits: I really hope DC Comics doesn’t browse Medium