Does garlic protect against vampires?
With Halloween only a few days away, we haven’t long to prepare ourselves against the creatures that go bump in the night.
Luckily, I’m well prepared and have taken appropriate steps to protect myself against witches, monsters and the creepy-crawlies that may all try to get through my front door in the night.
However, possibly the one I’m most fearful and less prepared against are vampires. Vampires are feared everywhere especially in the Balkan region so I’m weighing up the options to see which protection method would be the most reliable.
I’ve considered many of the popular options:
• A simple stake through the heart – common in Southern Slavic cultures however, the Russians only found this to work when the type of wood was Ash [1] and I certainly don’t have any stake shaped ash lying around.
• Decapitation – this is the preferred method amongst Germans, decapitating their head from their body, which is great in theory but probably not as easy in practice.
• Holy water – we could drench them in Holy water as this is thought to burn their skin [2]. Oh wait, unless you’re a Priest you’re unlikely to have access to that…
• Mirrors – mirrors have been used to ward off vampires when placed, facing outwards, on a door and was used by Bram Stoker in Dracula. However, not all vampires have a reflection and sometimes do not cast a shadow [3] so it’s probably not our best or most reliable option.
Despite these all being great options, I’ve concluded they’re either too difficult to implement or to resource, which leads me to one (last) possible option – garlic! It’s easy to get a hold of and very inexpensive. In fact, Bram Stoker himself suggested the use of garlic to ward off vampires.
Now this seems to work in the movies however, I want to be certain so as luck should have it a group of researchers back in the nineties explored the hypothesis behind garlic’s apotropaic effect against warding off vampires and this is what they found:
Firstly, due to the lack of participating vampires the researchers we forced to use blood-sucking leeches instead – ok, so they’re not as scary, but they still love to drink your blood.
The researchers then allowed the leeches to attach themselves to one of two hands; a garlic-smeared hand and a non-garlic hand.
The results
To their surprise, two-thirds of the leeches preferred the garlic-smeared hand over the non-garlic hand. In fact, leeches who took to the garlic-smeared hand took 14.9 seconds to attach themselves compared to 44.9 seconds for the non-garlic hand [4].
As we can see from the results of this study, the traditional belief that garlic has apotropaic properties could likely be wrong, and the reverse may in fact be true, garlic does not protect against vamipres! I suppose this now means that my pot of garlic is futile and we shouldn’t believe everything we see on TV.
I guess the only real option we have is to wait the night out until sunrise; unless of course you get one knocking at your door in which case refusing them entry will keep them away from your home and out of harm’s way [5] – a much easier option if you ask me.
Good luck and Happy Halloween!