Another Damn Vampire

When I declared it to be shark-jumping season in vampire land it seems that I wasn't kidding. Three weeks ago a young man who claimed to be a 500-year-old vampire was arrested in Texas for attacking a woman and attempting to drink her blood. Now another vampire attack has been reported in Florida just in time, I suppose, for the True Blood season finale.

Milton Ellis, 69, told police in St. Petersburg, Florida, that he and Josephine Smith, 22, met on the street and went to the porch of a vacant restaurant to get out of the rain. He said he fell asleep in his motorized wheelchair and woke up to find Smith on top of him.

Ellis told authorities that she said, "I'm a vampire. I am going to eat you" and then began to bite him.

According to a police affidavit, Ellis was bitten on his arm and lips, leaving him bloody before he was able to escape and call police. He was later treated with stitches at a local hospital and released.

After arriving at the scene, police said they found Smith bloody and half-naked nearby, but that she had no memory of what happened and did not identify herself as a vampire, St. Petersburg Police spokesman Mike Puetz said.

I suppose it goes without saying that both the Texas man and this Florida woman are likely suffering from serious mental problems. Because they totally aren't vampires, at least not the sort who are centuries old and burn up in the sun. Some people who suffer from certain types of anemia do crave blood and sometimes describe themselves as vampires, but Dracula and the entire modern vampire genre it spawned are fiction only vaguely based on the original European vampire mythos. There's nothing undead about either of these two troubled individuals, and I hope that they can get some psychiatric help before they injure anyone else.