1991 VAMPIRE SKELETON PARTY PLATES Amscan Halloween decor Mr Bones vintage rare

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Seller: sidewaysstairsco ✉️ (1,180) 100%, Location: Santa Ana, California, US, Ships to: US & many other countries, Item: 202648462776 1991 VAMPIRE SKELETON PARTY PLATES Amscan Halloween decor Mr Bones vintage rare. Check out my other new & used items>>>>>>HERE! (click me) FOR SALE: A bundle of awesome, Halloween-themed party paper plates 1991 AMSCAN "MR BONES" HALLOWEEN PARTY PLATES BUNDLE (40 TOTAL) DETAILS: Whats's Included? 4 Packages of 7" Diameter Plates (8 per pack; 32 total). 1 Package of 9" Diameter Plates (8 per pack; 8 total). Silly, timeless design! From the 1991 Halloween season, these vintage party plates depict a smiling, red-eyed and red-fanged skeleton waving in the center of each orange-rimmed plate. Behind the creepy but cheery skeleton is a grey spider web pattern that adds some eerieness. This "Mr. Bones" or "Monsieur Squelette" plate design was retired by Amscan in the early '90s. Perfect for Halloween festivities or all-year-round decoration. Ideal for bringing more Halloween spirit to your household or next monster mash. Makes a great gift for Halloween-themed item collectors and enthusiasts, especially those who prefer spooky decor or tableware all year! Each plate is made of paperboard that's been coated to resist moisture absorption. A retired Amscan exclusive product! The "Mr. Bones" Halloween party plates were produced, in limited supply, by Amscan Inc. in 1991 and were sold in retail stores only during the 1991 Halloween season. These products have been retired and haven't been available in store, or online, since 1991 - making them a rare find and collectible! Intact still on each package of plates is the original Amscan Inc. label and partial price stickers from the retail craft store, Michaels. We are able to date these plates to 1991 as the Michaels stickers contain a printed date from the day they were priced and made available in store. CONDITION: New old stock with some shelf wear. Each package is still sealed though the 9" plates package has a fairly large opening at its seam. A few packages have light age discoloration spots on the backside of the bottom plate. Please see photos. *To ensure safe delivery all items are carefully packaged before shipping out.* THANK YOU FOR LOOKING. QUESTIONS? JUST ASK. *ALL PHOTOS AND TEXT ARE INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY OF SIDEWAYS STAIRS CO. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.* "Party City Holdco Inc. is an American publicly traded retail chain of party stores founded in 1986 by Steve Mandell in East Hanover, New Jersey. Based in Elmsford, New York, the company is the largest retailer of party goods in the United States, Canada and Mexico, operating over 900 company-owned and franchise outlets under the Party City, Halloween City, Toy City, and Factory Card & Party Outlet brands.... History 1986–1993: Founding and franchising Facade of a Party City store in The Woodlands, Texas Party City was founded by Steve Mandell in 1986, Mandell recognized that the market for party goods was highly fragmented with a lot of small mom-and-pop operations, a large number of retailers carrying limited supplies, and no big players dominating the party goods market. Mandell decided to specialize in the business when he struck out on his own to realize his long-cherished goal of running his own retail operation. After scraping together $125,000, he opened a 4,000 square feet (370 m2) store in East Hanover, New Jersey, naming it Party City. The operation was immediately successful and within a year Mandell started planning for a second location. He also began to hear from people asking to franchise the Party City concept, and as a result Party City began its evolution into a national chain. After his first year in business Mandell also decided to concentrate on Halloween, so that in 1987 over a quarter of his store was turned into a "Halloween Costume Warehouse." The move proved highly successful and led to the company's ongoing focus on the holiday, and the major impact that the month of October would have on the company's bottom line. Year-round, Party City stocked an inventory of Halloween costumes, if for no other reason than to make customers aware of the items for the next Halloween season.[3] One quarter ($560 million) of Party City's 2015 revenue came from Halloween; the company operates about 300 Halloween City pop-up stores.[4] The first Party City franchise store opened in 1989 in Hazlet, NJ[5] and by 1990 Mandell also owned four Party City stores. At this point he incorporated the business as a franchising operation, with his stores forming the core of the chain. By the end of 1990, Party City outlets numbered 11; five more franchised stores were added in 1991, 16 in 1992, and another 26 in 1993, bringing the total to 58. Party City was now a nationwide chain with store locations ranging from Hawaii to Puerto Rico. The company's annual revenues in 1993 topped $2.4 million and net profits approached $235,000. During these first four years of operation, Mandell refined the Party City concept, including store design, product mix, choice of suppliers, and the implementation of systems. With a successful store model in hand, Mandell in late 1993 decided to de-emphasize franchising in favor of opening company-owned stores, which would generate greater returns for the corporation than it could receive on fees and royalties from franchised outlets, as well as allow Mandell to better control the destiny of Party City. While franchisees might maintain a tighter control on inventory, Mandell was insistent that company-owned units would be amply stocked with a wide range of merchandise.[3][5] 2005–present: Acquisitions and developments Party City in Markham, Ontario, Canada We Stand With Ukraine heart foil balloons in the United States. In 2005, the company was sold to a subsidiary of AAH Holdings Corporation, owner of Amscan, a designer, manufacturer and distributor of party goods in America.[6] Amscan then went on to acquire the party retailers Party America in 2006 and Factory Card & Party Outlet in 2007. Both retail chains began to operate under the Party City network, thereby making Party City the largest party supplies retailer in the United States.[7] With Amscan's 2011 acquisition of American Greetings' Designware party division, Party City added licensing agreements with Nickelodeon, Sesame Workshop, and Hasbro.[8] In 2011, Amscan became a licensee for MLB, NBA, NFL, NHL and NCAA party products and balloons, and Party City carries all teams in their respective markets and offers the entire assortment in larger stores and online.[9] In 2011, Party City expanded outside the United States with the acquisition of the Canadian retailer Party Packagers, making Party City the largest party goods retailer in North America.[citation needed] In 2012, these stores began to re-brand as Party City.[citation needed] In 2013, Party City bought iParty.[10] In December 2017, Party City acquired MG Novelty Corporation for around $5.5 million, which operated seven retail stores under the name Party Galaxy in the Oklahoma City metropolitan area.[11] In 2017, Party City purchased its franchised locations in the Carolinas.[12] Advent International, Berkshire Partners LLC and Weston Presidio in 2012 sold Thomas H. Lee Partners a majority stake in Party City. In 2015, Party City Holdco Inc went public with Thomas H. Lee Partners retaining 55% and Advent International owned 19 percent. In April 2017, the company was approached by a private equity firm to acquire the company. In response the company placed itself on the market.[12] In June 2018, Party City announced that it would open around 50 Toy City pop-up stores beginning in September 2018, alongside its Halloween City stores. The stores operated through the conclusion of the holiday season, and was meant to capitalize upon the closure of the U.S. locations of Toys "R" Us. Some of its locations utilized vacancies created by the Toys "R" Us shutdown.[13][14][15] In May 2019, it was announced that the chain would be closing 45 locations "to help optimize our market-level performance, focus on the most profitable locations, and improve the overall health of our store portfolio".[16] Party City's Canadian operations were acquired by Canadian Tire in August 2019 for $174.4 million CAD.[17] Party City, in support of Ukraine during the 2022 Russian Invasion of Ukraine, sold We Stand With Ukraine heart foil balloons in some of their establishments. The proceeds of the balloons went towards Ukrainian Crisis Fund CARE." (wikipedia.org) "Halloween or Hallowe'en (a contraction of "All Hallows' evening"),[5] less commonly known as Allhalloween,[6] All Hallows' Eve,[7] or All Saints' Eve,[8] is a celebration observed in many countries on 31 October, the eve of the Western Christian feast of All Hallows' Day. It begins the observance of Allhallowtide,[9] the time in the liturgical year dedicated to remembering the dead, including saints (hallows), martyrs, and all the departed.[10][11] One theory holds that many Halloween traditions were influenced by Celtic harvest festivals, particularly the Gaelic festival Samhain, which are believed to have pagan roots.[12][13][14][15] Some go further and suggest that Samhain may have been Christianized as All Hallow's Day, along with its eve, by the early Church.[16] Other academics believe Halloween began solely as a Christian holiday, being the vigil of All Hallow's Day.[17][18][19][20] Celebrated in Ireland and Scotland for centuries, Irish and Scottish migrants brought many Halloween customs to North America in the 19th century,[21][22] and then through American influence, Halloween spread to other countries by the late 20th and early 21st century.[23][24] Halloween activities include trick-or-treating (or the related guising and souling), attending Halloween costume parties, carving pumpkins into jack-o'-lanterns, lighting bonfires, apple bobbing, divination games, playing pranks, visiting haunted attractions, telling scary stories, and watching horror or Halloween-themed films.[25] For some people, the Christian religious observances of All Hallows' Eve, including attending church services and lighting candles on the graves of the dead, remain popular,[26][27][28] although it is a secular celebration for others.[29][30][31] Some Christians historically abstained from meat on All Hallows' Eve, a tradition reflected in the eating of certain vegetarian foods on this vigil day, including apples, potato pancakes, and soul cakes.... Etymology The word appears as the title of Robert Burns' "Halloween" (1785), a poem traditionally recited by Scots. The word Halloween or Hallowe'en dates to about 1745[36] and is of Christian origin.[37] The word Hallowe'en means "Saints' evening".[38] It comes from a Scottish term for All Hallows' Eve (the evening before All Hallows' Day).[39] In Scots, the word eve is even, and this is contracted to e'en or een.[40] Over time, (All) Hallow(s) E(v)en evolved into Hallowe'en. Although the phrase "All Hallows'" is found in Old English, "All Hallows' Eve" is itself not seen until 1556.[39][41] History Christian origins and historic customs Halloween is thought to have roots in Christian beliefs and practices.[42][43] The English word 'Halloween' comes from "All Hallows' Eve", being the evening before the Christian holy days of All Hallows' Day (All Saints' Day) on 1 November and All Souls' Day on 2 November.[44] Since the time of the early Church,[45] major feasts in Christianity (such as Christmas, Easter and Pentecost) had vigils that began the night before, as did the feast of All Hallows'.[46][42] These three days are collectively called Allhallowtide and are a time when Christians honour saints and pray for recently departed souls who have yet to reach Heaven. Commemorations of all saints and martyrs were held by several churches on various dates, mostly in springtime.[47] In 4th-century Roman Edessa it was held on 13 May, and on 13 May 609, Pope Boniface IV re-dedicated the Pantheon in Rome to "St Mary and all martyrs".[48] This was the date of Lemuria, an ancient Roman festival of the dead.[49] Beginning in the 4th century, the feast of All Hallows' in the Western Christian Church commemorated Christian martyrs and in the 8th century, Pope Gregory III (731–741) founded of an oratory in St Peter's for the relics "of the holy apostles and of all saints, martyrs and confessors".[42][50] Some sources say it was dedicated on 1 November,[51] while others say it was on Palm Sunday.[52][53] By 800, there is evidence that churches in Ireland[54] and Northumbria were holding a feast commemorating all saints on 1 November.[55] Alcuin of Northumbria, a member of Charlemagne's court, may then have introduced this 1 November date in the Frankish Empire.[56] In 835, it became the official date in the Frankish Empire.[55] Some suggest this was due to Celtic influence, while others suggest it was a Germanic idea,[55] although it is claimed that both Germanic and Celtic-speaking peoples commemorated the dead at the beginning of winter.[57] They may have seen it as the most fitting time to do so, as it is a time of 'dying' in nature.[55][57] It is also suggested the change was made on the "practical grounds that Rome in summer could not accommodate the great number of pilgrims who flocked to it", and perhaps because of public health concerns over Roman Fever, which claimed a number of lives during Rome's sultry summers.[58][42] On All Hallows' Eve, Christians in some parts of the world visit cemeteries to pray and place flowers and candles on the graves of their loved ones.[59] Top: Christians in Bangladesh lighting candles on the headstone of a relative. Bottom: Lutheran Christians praying and lighting candles in front of the central crucifix of a graveyard. By the end of the 12th century they had become holy days of obligation in Western Christianity and involved such traditions as ringing church bells for souls in purgatory. It was also "customary for criers dressed in black to parade the streets, ringing a bell of mournful sound and calling on all good Christians to remember the poor souls".[60] The Allhallowtide custom of baking and sharing soul cakes for all christened souls,[61] has been suggested as the origin of trick-or-treating.[62] The custom dates back at least as far as the 15th century[63] and was found in parts of England, Wales, Flanders, Bavaria and Austria.[64] Groups of poor people, often children, would go door-to-door during Allhallowtide, collecting soul cakes, in exchange for praying for the dead, especially the souls of the givers' friends and relatives. This was called "souling".[63][65][66] Soul cakes were also offered for the souls themselves to eat,[64] or the 'soulers' would act as their representatives.[67] As with the Lenten tradition of hot cross buns, soul cakes were often marked with a cross, indicating they were baked as alms.[68] Shakespeare mentions souling in his comedy The Two Gentlemen of Verona (1593).[69] While souling, Christians would carry "lanterns made of hollowed-out turnips", which could have originally represented souls of the dead;[70][71] jack-o'-lanterns were used to ward off evil spirits.[72][73] On All Saints' and All Souls' Day during the 19th century, candles were lit in homes in Ireland,[74] Flanders, Bavaria, and in Tyrol, where they were called "soul lights",[75] that served "to guide the souls back to visit their earthly homes".[76] In many of these places, candles were also lit at graves on All Souls' Day.[75] In Brittany, libations of milk were poured on the graves of kinfolk,[64] or food would be left overnight on the dinner table for the returning souls;[75] a custom also found in Tyrol and parts of Italy.[77][75] Christian minister Prince Sorie Conteh linked the wearing of costumes to the belief in vengeful ghosts: "It was traditionally believed that the souls of the departed wandered the earth until All Saints' Day, and All Hallows' Eve provided one last chance for the dead to gain vengeance on their enemies before moving to the next world. In order to avoid being recognized by any soul that might be seeking such vengeance, people would don masks or costumes".[78] It is claimed that in the Middle Ages, churches that were too poor to display relics of martyred saints at Allhallowtide let parishioners dress up as saints instead.[79][80] Some Christians observe this custom at Halloween today.[81] Lesley Bannatyne believes this could have been a Christianization of an earlier pagan custom.[82] Many Christians in mainland Europe, especially in France, believed "that once a year, on Hallowe'en, the dead of the churchyards rose for one wild, hideous carnival" known as the danse macabre, which was often depicted in church decoration.[83] Christopher Allmand and Rosamond McKitterick write in The New Cambridge Medieval History that the danse macabre urged Christians "not to forget the end of all earthly things".[84] The danse macabre was sometimes enacted at village pageants and court masques, with people "dressing up as corpses from various strata of society", and this may be the origin of Halloween costume parties.[85][86][87][70] In Britain, these customs came under attack during the Reformation, as Protestants berated purgatory as a "popish" doctrine incompatible with the Calvinist doctrine of predestination. State-sanctioned ceremonies associated with the intercession of saints and prayer for souls in purgatory were abolished during the Elizabethan reform, though All Hallow's Day remained in the English liturgical calendar to "commemorate saints as godly human beings".[88] For some Nonconformist Protestants, the theology of All Hallows' Eve was redefined; "souls cannot be journeying from Purgatory on their way to Heaven, as Catholics frequently believe and assert. Instead, the so-called ghosts are thought to be in actuality evil spirits".[89] Other Protestants believed in an intermediate state known as Hades (Bosom of Abraham).[90] In some localities, Catholics and Protestants continued souling, candlelit processions, or ringing church bells for the dead;[44][91] the Anglican church eventually suppressed this bell-ringing.[92] Mark Donnelly, a professor of medieval archaeology, and historian Daniel Diehl write that "barns and homes were blessed to protect people and livestock from the effect of witches, who were believed to accompany the malignant spirits as they traveled the earth".[93] After 1605, Hallowtide was eclipsed in England by Guy Fawkes Night (5 November), which appropriated some of its customs.[94] In England, the ending of official ceremonies related to the intercession of saints led to the development of new, unofficial Hallowtide customs. In 18th–19th century rural Lancashire, Catholic families gathered on hills on the night of All Hallows' Eve. One held a bunch of burning straw on a pitchfork while the rest knelt around him, praying for the souls of relatives and friends until the flames went out. This was known as teen'lay.[95] There was a similar custom in Hertfordshire, and the lighting of 'tindle' fires in Derbyshire.[96] Some suggested these 'tindles' were originally lit to "guide the poor souls back to earth".[97] In Scotland and Ireland, old Allhallowtide customs that were at odds with Reformed teaching were not suppressed as they "were important to the life cycle and rites of passage of local communities" and curbing them would have been difficult.[21] In parts of Italy until the 15th century, families left a meal out for the ghosts of relatives, before leaving for church services.[77] In 19th-century Italy, churches staged "theatrical re-enactments of scenes from the lives of the saints" on All Hallow's Day, with "participants represented by realistic wax figures".[77] In 1823, the graveyard of Holy Spirit Hospital in Rome presented a scene in which bodies of those who recently died were arrayed around a wax statue of an angel who pointed upward towards heaven.[77] In the same country, "parish priests went house-to-house, asking for small gifts of food which they shared among themselves throughout that night".[77] In Spain, they continue to bake special pastries called "bones of the holy" (Spanish: Huesos de Santo) and set them on graves.[98] At cemeteries in Spain and France, as well as in Latin America, priests lead Christian processions and services during Allhallowtide, after which people keep an all night vigil.[99] In 19th-century San Sebastián, there was a procession to the city cemetery at Allhallowtide, an event that drew beggars who "appeal[ed] to the tender recollectons of one's deceased relations and friends" for sympathy.[100] Gaelic folk influence An early 20th-century Irish Halloween mask displayed at the Museum of Country Life Today's Halloween customs are thought to have been influenced by folk customs and beliefs from the Celtic-speaking countries, some of which are believed to have pagan roots.[101] Jack Santino, a folklorist, writes that "there was throughout Ireland an uneasy truce existing between customs and beliefs associated with Christianity and those associated with religions that were Irish before Christianity arrived".[102] The origins of Halloween customs are typically linked to the Gaelic festival Samhain.[103] Samhain is one of the quarter days in the medieval Gaelic calendar and has been celebrated on 31 October – 1 November[104] in Ireland, Scotland and the Isle of Man.[105][106] A kindred festival has been held by the Brittonic Celts, called Calan Gaeaf in Wales, Kalan Gwav in Cornwall and Kalan Goañv in Brittany; a name meaning "first day of winter". For the Celts, the day ended and began at sunset; thus the festival begins the evening before 1 November by modern reckoning.[107] Samhain is mentioned in some of the earliest Irish literature. The names have been used by historians to refer to Celtic Halloween customs up until the 19th century,[108] and are still the Gaelic and Welsh names for Halloween. Snap-Apple Night, painted by Daniel Maclise in 1833, shows people feasting and playing divination games on Halloween in Ireland.[109] Samhain marked the end of the harvest season and beginning of winter or the 'darker half' of the year.[110][111] It was seen as a liminal time, when the boundary between this world and the Otherworld thinned. This meant the Aos Sí, the 'spirits' or 'fairies', could more easily come into this world and were particularly active.[112][113] Most scholars see them as "degraded versions of ancient gods [...] whose power remained active in the people's minds even after they had been officially replaced by later religious beliefs".[114] They were both respected and feared, with individuals often invoking the protection of God when approaching their dwellings.[115][116] At Samhain, the Aos Sí were appeased to ensure the people and livestock survived the winter. Offerings of food and drink, or portions of the crops, were left outside for them.[117][118][119] The souls of the dead were also said to revisit their homes seeking hospitality.[120] Places were set at the dinner table and by the fire to welcome them.[121] The belief that the souls of the dead return home on one night of the year and must be appeased seems to have ancient origins and is found in many cultures.[64] In 19th century Ireland, "candles would be lit and prayers formally offered for the souls of the dead. After this the eating, drinking, and games would begin".[122] Throughout Ireland and Britain, especially in the Celtic-speaking regions, the household festivities included divination rituals and games intended to foretell one's future, especially regarding death and marriage.[123] Apples and nuts were often used, and customs included apple bobbing, nut roasting, scrying or mirror-gazing, pouring molten lead or egg whites into water, dream interpretation, and others.[124] Special bonfires were lit and there were rituals involving them. Their flames, smoke, and ashes were deemed to have protective and cleansing powers.[110] In some places, torches lit from the bonfire were carried sunwise around homes and fields to protect them.[108] It is suggested the fires were a kind of imitative or sympathetic magic – they mimicked the Sun and held back the decay and darkness of winter.[121][125][126] They were also used for divination and to ward off evil spirits.[72] In Scotland, these bonfires and divination games were banned by the church elders in some parishes.[127] In Wales, bonfires were also lit to "prevent the souls of the dead from falling to earth".[128] Later, these bonfires "kept away the devil".[129] photograph A plaster cast of a traditional Irish Halloween turnip (rutabaga) lantern on display in the Museum of Country Life, Ireland[130] From at least the 16th century,[131] the festival included mumming and guising in Ireland, Scotland, the Isle of Man and Wales.[132] This involved people going house-to-house in costume (or in disguise), usually reciting verses or songs in exchange for food. It may have originally been a tradition whereby people impersonated the Aos Sí, or the souls of the dead, and received offerings on their behalf, similar to 'souling'. Impersonating these beings, or wearing a disguise, was also believed to protect oneself from them.[133] In parts of southern Ireland, the guisers included a hobby horse. A man dressed as a Láir Bhán (white mare) led youths house-to-house reciting verses – some of which had pagan overtones – in exchange for food. If the household donated food it could expect good fortune from the 'Muck Olla'; not doing so would bring misfortune.[134] In Scotland, youths went house-to-house with masked, painted or blackened faces, often threatening to do mischief if they were not welcomed.[132] F. Marian McNeill suggests the ancient festival included people in costume representing the spirits, and that faces were marked or blackened with ashes from the sacred bonfire.[131] In parts of Wales, men went about dressed as fearsome beings called gwrachod.[132] In the late 19th and early 20th century, young people in Glamorgan and Orkney cross-dressed.[132] Elsewhere in Europe, mumming was part of other festivals, but in the Celtic-speaking regions, it was "particularly appropriate to a night upon which supernatural beings were said to be abroad and could be imitated or warded off by human wanderers".[132] From at least the 18th century, "imitating malignant spirits" led to playing pranks in Ireland and the Scottish Highlands. Wearing costumes and playing pranks at Halloween did not spread to England until the 20th century.[132] Pranksters used hollowed-out turnips or mangel wurzels as lanterns, often carved with grotesque faces.[132] By those who made them, the lanterns were variously said to represent the spirits,[132] or used to ward off evil spirits.[135][136] They were common in parts of Ireland and the Scottish Highlands in the 19th century,[132] as well as in Somerset (see Punkie Night). In the 20th century they spread to other parts of Britain and became generally known as jack-o'-lanterns.[132] Spread to North America The annual New York Halloween Parade in Greenwich Village, Manhattan, is the world's largest Halloween parade. Lesley Bannatyne and Cindy Ott write that Anglican colonists in the southern United States and Catholic colonists in Maryland "recognized All Hallow's Eve in their church calendars",[137][138] although the Puritans of New England strongly opposed the holiday, along with other traditional celebrations of the established Church, including Christmas.[139] Almanacs of the late 18th and early 19th century give no indication that Halloween was widely celebrated in North America.[21] It was not until after mass Irish and Scottish immigration in the 19th century that Halloween became a major holiday in America.[21] Most American Halloween traditions were inherited from the Irish and Scots,[22][140] though "In Cajun areas, a nocturnal Mass was said in cemeteries on Halloween night. Candles that had been blessed were placed on graves, and families sometimes spent the entire night at the graveside".[141] Originally confined to these immigrant communities, it was gradually assimilated into mainstream society and was celebrated coast to coast by people of all social, racial, and religious backgrounds by the early 20th century.[142] Then, through American influence, these Halloween traditions spread to many other countries by the late 20th and early 21st century, including to mainland Europe.[23][24] Symbols At Halloween, yards, public spaces, and some houses may be decorated with traditionally macabre symbols including skeletons, ghosts, cobwebs, headstones, and scary looking witches. Development of artifacts and symbols associated with Halloween formed over time. Jack-o'-lanterns are traditionally carried by guisers on All Hallows' Eve in order to frighten evil spirits.[71][143] There is a popular Irish Christian folktale associated with the jack-o'-lantern,[144] which in folklore is said to represent a "soul who has been denied entry into both heaven and hell":[145]     On route home after a night's drinking, Jack encounters the Devil and tricks him into climbing a tree. A quick-thinking Jack etches the sign of the cross into the bark, thus trapping the Devil. Jack strikes a bargain that Satan can never claim his soul. After a life of sin, drink, and mendacity, Jack is refused entry to heaven when he dies. Keeping his promise, the Devil refuses to let Jack into hell and throws a live coal straight from the fires of hell at him. It was a cold night, so Jack places the coal in a hollowed out turnip to stop it from going out, since which time Jack and his lantern have been roaming looking for a place to rest.[146] In Ireland and Scotland, the turnip has traditionally been carved during Halloween,[147][148] but immigrants to North America used the native pumpkin, which is both much softer and much larger, making it easier to carve than a turnip.[147] The American tradition of carving pumpkins is recorded in 1837[149] and was originally associated with harvest time in general, not becoming specifically associated with Halloween until the mid-to-late 19th century.[150] Decorated house in Weatherly, Pennsylvania The modern imagery of Halloween comes from many sources, including Christian eschatology, national customs, works of Gothic and horror literature (such as the novels Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus and Dracula) and classic horror films such as Frankenstein (1931) and The Mummy (1932).[151][152] Imagery of the skull, a reference to Golgotha in the Christian tradition, serves as "a reminder of death and the transitory quality of human life" and is consequently found in memento mori and vanitas compositions;[153] skulls have therefore been commonplace in Halloween, which touches on this theme.[154] Traditionally, the back walls of churches are "decorated with a depiction of the Last Judgment, complete with graves opening and the dead rising, with a heaven filled with angels and a hell filled with devils", a motif that has permeated the observance of this triduum.[155] One of the earliest works on the subject of Halloween is from Scottish poet John Mayne, who, in 1780, made note of pranks at Halloween; "What fearfu' pranks ensue!", as well as the supernatural associated with the night, "Bogies" (ghosts), influencing Robert Burns' "Halloween" (1785).[156] Elements of the autumn season, such as pumpkins, corn husks, and scarecrows, are also prevalent. Homes are often decorated with these types of symbols around Halloween. Halloween imagery includes themes of death, evil, and mythical monsters.[157] Black cats, which have been long associated with witches, are also a common symbol of Halloween. Black, orange, and sometimes purple are Halloween's traditional colors.[158] Trick-or-treating and guising Main article: Trick-or-treating Trick-or-treaters in Sweden Trick-or-treating is a customary celebration for children on Halloween. Children go in costume from house to house, asking for treats such as candy or sometimes money, with the question, "Trick or treat?" The word "trick" implies a "threat" to perform mischief on the homeowners or their property if no treat is given.[62] The practice is said to have roots in the medieval practice of mumming, which is closely related to souling.[159] John Pymm wrote that "many of the feast days associated with the presentation of mumming plays were celebrated by the Christian Church."[160] These feast days included All Hallows' Eve, Christmas, Twelfth Night and Shrove Tuesday.[161][162] Mumming practiced in Germany, Scandinavia and other parts of Europe,[163] involved masked persons in fancy dress who "paraded the streets and entered houses to dance or play dice in silence".[164] Girl in a Halloween costume in 1928, Ontario, Canada, the same province where the Scottish Halloween custom of guising was first recorded in North America In England, from the medieval period,[165] up until the 1930s,[166] people practiced the Christian custom of souling on Halloween, which involved groups of soulers, both Protestant and Catholic,[91] going from parish to parish, begging the rich for soul cakes, in exchange for praying for the souls of the givers and their friends.[65] In the Philippines, the practice of souling is called Pangangaluwa and is practiced on All Hallow's Eve among children in rural areas.[25] People drape themselves in white cloths to represent souls and then visit houses, where they sing in return for prayers and sweets.[25] In Scotland and Ireland, guising – children disguised in costume going from door to door for food or coins – is a traditional Halloween custom.[167] It is recorded in Scotland at Halloween in 1895 where masqueraders in disguise carrying lanterns made out of scooped out turnips, visit homes to be rewarded with cakes, fruit, and money.[148][168] In Ireland, the most popular phrase for kids to shout (until the 2000s) was "Help the Halloween Party".[167] The practice of guising at Halloween in North America was first recorded in 1911, where a newspaper in Kingston, Ontario, Canada, reported children going "guising" around the neighborhood.[169] American historian and author Ruth Edna Kelley of Massachusetts wrote the first book-length history of Halloween in the US; The Book of Hallowe'en (1919), and references souling in the chapter "Hallowe'en in America".[170] In her book, Kelley touches on customs that arrived from across the Atlantic; "Americans have fostered them, and are making this an occasion something like what it must have been in its best days overseas. All Halloween customs in the United States are borrowed directly or adapted from those of other countries".[171] While the first reference to "guising" in North America occurs in 1911, another reference to ritual begging on Halloween appears, place unknown, in 1915, with a third reference in Chicago in 1920.[172] The earliest known use in print of the term "trick or treat" appears in 1927, in the Blackie Herald, of Alberta, Canada.[173] An automobile trunk at a trunk-or-treat event at St. John Lutheran Church and Early Learning Center in Darien, Illinois The thousands of Halloween postcards produced between the turn of the 20th century and the 1920s commonly show children but not trick-or-treating.[174] Trick-or-treating does not seem to have become a widespread practice in North America until the 1930s, with the first US appearances of the term in 1934,[175] and the first use in a national publication occurring in 1939.[176] A popular variant of trick-or-treating, known as trunk-or-treating (or Halloween tailgating), occurs when "children are offered treats from the trunks of cars parked in a church parking lot", or sometimes, a school parking lot.[98][177] In a trunk-or-treat event, the trunk (boot) of each automobile is decorated with a certain theme,[178] such as those of children's literature, movies, scripture, and job roles.[179] Trunk-or-treating has grown in popularity due to its perception as being more safe than going door to door, a point that resonates well with parents, as well as the fact that it "solves the rural conundrum in which homes [are] built a half-mile apart".[180][181] Costumes Main article: Halloween costume Halloween costumes were traditionally modeled after figures such as vampires, ghosts, skeletons, scary looking witches, and devils.[62] Over time, the costume selection extended to include popular characters from fiction, celebrities, and generic archetypes such as ninjas and princesses. Halloween shop in Derry, Northern Ireland, selling masks Dressing up in costumes and going "guising" was prevalent in Scotland and Ireland at Halloween by the late 19th century.[148] A Scottish term, the tradition is called "guising" because of the disguises or costumes worn by the children.[168] In Ireland the masks are known as 'false faces'.[182] Costuming became popular for Halloween parties in the US in the early 20th century, as often for adults as for children, and when trick-or-treating was becoming popular in Canada and the US in the 1920s and 1930s.[173][183] Eddie J. Smith, in his book Halloween, Hallowed is Thy Name, offers a religious perspective to the wearing of costumes on All Hallows' Eve, suggesting that by dressing up as creatures "who at one time caused us to fear and tremble", people are able to poke fun at Satan "whose kingdom has been plundered by our Saviour". Images of skeletons and the dead are traditional decorations used as memento mori.[184][185] "Trick-or-Treat for UNICEF" is a fundraising program to support UNICEF,[62] a United Nations Programme that provides humanitarian aid to children in developing countries. Started as a local event in a Northeast Philadelphia neighborhood in 1950 and expanded nationally in 1952, the program involves the distribution of small boxes by schools (or in modern times, corporate sponsors like Hallmark, at their licensed stores) to trick-or-treaters, in which they can solicit small-change donations from the houses they visit. It is estimated that children have collected more than $118 million for UNICEF since its inception. In Canada, in 2006, UNICEF decided to discontinue their Halloween collection boxes, citing safety and administrative concerns; after consultation with schools, they instead redesigned the program.[186][187] The yearly New York's Village Halloween Parade was begun in 1974; it is the world's largest Halloween parade and America's only major nighttime parade, attracting more than 60,000 costumed participants, two million spectators, and a worldwide television audience.[188] Since the late 2010s, ethnic stereotypes as costumes have increasingly come under scrutiny in the United States.[189] Such and other potentially offensive costumes have been met with increasing public disapproval.[190][191] Pet costumes According to a 2018 report from the National Retail Federation, 30 million Americans will spend an estimated $480 million on Halloween costumes for their pets in 2018. This is up from an estimated $200 million in 2010. The most popular costumes for pets are the pumpkin, followed by the hot dog, and the bumblebee in third place.[192] Games and other activities In this 1904 Halloween greeting card, divination is depicted: the young woman looking into a mirror in a darkened room hopes to catch a glimpse of her future husband. There are several games traditionally associated with Halloween. Some of these games originated as divination rituals or ways of foretelling one's future, especially regarding death, marriage and children. During the Middle Ages, these rituals were done by a "rare few" in rural communities as they were considered to be "deadly serious" practices.[193] In recent centuries, these divination games have been "a common feature of the household festivities" in Ireland and Britain.[123] They often involve apples and hazelnuts. In Celtic mythology, apples were strongly associated with the Otherworld and immortality, while hazelnuts were associated with divine wisdom.[194] Some also suggest that they derive from Roman practices in celebration of Pomona.[62] Children bobbing for apples at Hallowe'en The following activities were a common feature of Halloween in Ireland and Britain during the 17th–20th centuries. Some have become more widespread and continue to be popular today. One common game is apple bobbing or dunking (which may be called "dooking" in Scotland)[195] in which apples float in a tub or a large basin of water and the participants must use only their teeth to remove an apple from the basin. A variant of dunking involves kneeling on a chair, holding a fork between the teeth and trying to drive the fork into an apple. Another common game involves hanging up treacle or syrup-coated scones by strings; these must be eaten without using hands while they remain attached to the string, an activity that inevitably leads to a sticky face. Another once-popular game involves hanging a small wooden rod from the ceiling at head height, with a lit candle on one end and an apple hanging from the other. The rod is spun round and everyone takes turns to try to catch the apple with their teeth.[196] Image from the Book of Hallowe'en (1919) showing several Halloween activities, such as nut roasting Several of the traditional activities from Ireland and Britain involve foretelling one's future partner or spouse. An apple would be peeled in one long strip, then the peel tossed over the shoulder. The peel is believed to land in the shape of the first letter of the future spouse's name.[197][198] Two hazelnuts would be roasted near a fire; one named for the person roasting them and the other for the person they desire. If the nuts jump away from the heat, it is a bad sign, but if the nuts roast quietly it foretells a good match.[199][200] A salty oatmeal bannock would be baked; the person would eat it in three bites and then go to bed in silence without anything to drink. This is said to result in a dream in which their future spouse offers them a drink to quench their thirst.[201] Unmarried women were told that if they sat in a darkened room and gazed into a mirror on Halloween night, the face of their future husband would appear in the mirror.[202] The custom was widespread enough to be commemorated on greeting cards[203] from the late 19th century and early 20th century. Another popular Irish game was known as púicíní ("blindfolds"); a person would be blindfolded and then would choose between several saucers. The item in the saucer would provide a hint as to their future: a ring would mean that they would marry soon; clay, that they would die soon, perhaps within the year; water, that they would emigrate; rosary beads, that they would take Holy Orders (become a nun, priest, monk, etc.); a coin, that they would become rich; a bean, that they would be poor.[204][205][206][207] The game features prominently in the James Joyce short story "Clay" (1914).[208][209][210] In Ireland and Scotland, items would be hidden in food – usually a cake, barmbrack, cranachan, champ or colcannon – and portions of it served out at random. A person's future would be foretold by the item they happened to find; for example, a ring meant marriage and a coin meant wealth.[211] Up until the 19th century, the Halloween bonfires were also used for divination in parts of Scotland, Wales and Brittany. When the fire died down, a ring of stones would be laid in the ashes, one for each person. In the morning, if any stone was mislaid it was said that the person it represented would not live out the year.[108] Telling ghost stories, listening to Halloween-themed songs and watching horror films are common fixtures of Halloween parties. Episodes of television series and Halloween-themed specials (with the specials usually aimed at children) are commonly aired on or before Halloween, while new horror films are often released before Halloween to take advantage of the holiday. Haunted attractions Main article: Haunted attraction (simulated) Humorous tombstones in front of a house in California Humorous display window in Historic 25th Street, Ogden, Utah Haunted attractions are entertainment venues designed to thrill and scare patrons. Most attractions are seasonal Halloween businesses that may include haunted houses, corn mazes, and hayrides,[212] and the level of sophistication of the effects has risen as the industry has grown. The first recorded purpose-built haunted attraction was the Orton and Spooner Ghost House, which opened in 1915 in Liphook, England. This attraction actually most closely resembles a carnival fun house, powered by steam.[213][214] The House still exists, in the Hollycombe Steam Collection. It was during the 1930s, about the same time as trick-or-treating, that Halloween-themed haunted houses first began to appear in America. It was in the late 1950s that haunted houses as a major attraction began to appear, focusing first on California. Sponsored by the Children's Health Home Junior Auxiliary, the San Mateo Haunted House opened in 1957. The San Bernardino Assistance League Haunted House opened in 1958. Home haunts began appearing across the country during 1962 and 1963. In 1964, the San Manteo Haunted House opened, as well as the Children's Museum Haunted House in Indianapolis.[215] The haunted house as an American cultural icon can be attributed to the opening of the Haunted Mansion in Disneyland on 12 August 1969.[216] Knott's Berry Farm began hosting its own Halloween night attraction, Knott's Scary Farm, which opened in 1973.[217] Evangelical Christians adopted a form of these attractions by opening one of the first "hell houses" in 1972.[218] The first Halloween haunted house run by a nonprofit organization was produced in 1970 by the Sycamore-Deer Park Jaycees in Clifton, Ohio. It was cosponsored by WSAI, an AM radio station broadcasting out of Cincinnati, Ohio. It was last produced in 1982.[219] Other Jaycees followed suit with their own versions after the success of the Ohio house. The March of Dimes copyrighted a "Mini haunted house for the March of Dimes" in 1976 and began fundraising through their local chapters by conducting haunted houses soon after. Although they apparently quit supporting this type of event nationally sometime in the 1980s, some March of Dimes haunted houses have persisted until today.[220] On the evening of 11 May 1984, in Jackson Township, New Jersey, the Haunted Castle (Six Flags Great Adventure) caught fire. As a result of the fire, eight teenagers perished.[221] The backlash to the tragedy was a tightening of regulations relating to safety, building codes and the frequency of inspections of attractions nationwide. The smaller venues, especially the nonprofit attractions, were unable to compete financially, and the better funded commercial enterprises filled the vacuum.[222][223] Facilities that were once able to avoid regulation because they were considered to be temporary installations now had to adhere to the stricter codes required of permanent attractions.[224][225][226] In the late 1980s and early 1990s, theme parks entered the business seriously. Six Flags Fright Fest began in 1986 and Universal Studios Florida began Halloween Horror Nights in 1991. Knott's Scary Farm experienced a surge in attendance in the 1990s as a result of America's obsession with Halloween as a cultural event. Theme parks have played a major role in globalizing the holiday. Universal Studios Singapore and Universal Studios Japan both participate, while Disney now mounts Mickey's Not-So-Scary Halloween Party events at its parks in Paris, Hong Kong and Tokyo, as well as in the United States.[227] The theme park haunts are by far the largest, both in scale and attendance.[228] Food Pumpkins for sale during Halloween On All Hallows' Eve, many Western Christian denominations encourage abstinence from meat, giving rise to a variety of vegetarian foods associated with this day.[229] A candy apple Because in the Northern Hemisphere Halloween comes in the wake of the yearly apple harvest, candy apples (known as toffee apples outside North America), caramel apples or taffy apples are common Halloween treats made by rolling whole apples in a sticky sugar syrup, sometimes followed by rolling them in nuts. At one time, candy apples were commonly given to trick-or-treating children, but the practice rapidly waned in the wake of widespread rumors that some individuals were embedding items like pins and razor blades in the apples in the United States.[230] While there is evidence of such incidents,[231] relative to the degree of reporting of such cases, actual cases involving malicious acts are extremely rare and have never resulted in serious injury. Nonetheless, many parents assumed that such heinous practices were rampant because of the mass media. At the peak of the hysteria, some hospitals offered free X-rays of children's Halloween hauls in order to find evidence of tampering. Virtually all of the few known candy poisoning incidents involved parents who poisoned their own children's candy.[232] One custom that persists in modern-day Ireland is the baking (or more often nowadays, the purchase) of a barmbrack (Irish: báirín breac), which is a light fruitcake, into which a plain ring, a coin, and other charms are placed before baking.[233] It is considered fortunate to be the lucky one who finds it.[233] It has also been said that those who get a ring will find their true love in the ensuing year. This is similar to the tradition of king cake at the festival of Epiphany. A jack-o'-lantern Halloween cake with a witches hat List of foods associated with Halloween:     Barmbrack (Ireland)     Bonfire toffee (Great Britain)     Candy apples/toffee apples (Great Britain and Ireland)     Candy apples, candy corn, candy pumpkins (North America)     Chocolate     Monkey nuts (peanuts in their shells) (Ireland and Scotland)     Caramel apples     Caramel corn     Colcannon (Ireland; see below)     Halloween cake     Sweets/candy     Novelty candy shaped like skulls, pumpkins, bats, worms, etc.     Roasted pumpkin seeds     Roasted sweet corn     Soul cakes     Pumpkin Pie Christian religious observances The Vigil of All Hallows' is being celebrated at an Episcopal Christian church on Hallowe'en On Hallowe'en (All Hallows' Eve), in Poland, believers were once taught to pray out loud as they walk through the forests in order that the souls of the dead might find comfort; in Spain, Christian priests in tiny villages toll their church bells in order to remind their congregants to remember the dead on All Hallows' Eve.[234] In Ireland, and among immigrants in Canada, a custom includes the Christian practice of abstinence, keeping All Hallows' Eve as a meat-free day and serving pancakes or colcannon instead.[235] In Mexico children make an altar to invite the return of the spirits of dead children (angelitos).[236] The Christian Church traditionally observed Hallowe'en through a vigil. Worshippers prepared themselves for feasting on the following All Saints' Day with prayers and fasting.[237] This church service is known as the Vigil of All Hallows or the Vigil of All Saints;[238][239] an initiative known as Night of Light seeks to further spread the Vigil of All Hallows throughout Christendom.[240][241] After the service, "suitable festivities and entertainments" often follow, as well as a visit to the graveyard or cemetery, where flowers and candles are often placed in preparation for All Hallows' Day.[242][243] In Finland, because so many people visit the cemeteries on All Hallows' Eve to light votive candles there, they "are known as valomeri, or seas of light".[244] Halloween Scripture Candy with gospel tract Today, Christian attitudes towards Halloween are diverse. In the Anglican Church, some dioceses have chosen to emphasize the Christian traditions associated with All Hallow's Eve.[245][246] Some of these practices include praying, fasting and attending worship services.[1][2][3]     O LORD our God, increase, we pray thee, and multiply upon us the gifts of thy grace: that we, who do prevent the glorious festival of all thy Saints, may of thee be enabled joyfully to follow them in all virtuous and godly living. Through Jesus Christ, Our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee, in the unity of the Holy Ghost, ever one God, world without end. Amen. —Collect of the Vigil of All Saints, The Anglican Breviary[247] Votive candles in the Halloween section of Walmart Other Protestant Christians also celebrate All Hallows' Eve as Reformation Day, a day to remember the Protestant Reformation, alongside All Hallow's Eve or independently from it.[248] This is because Martin Luther is said to have nailed his Ninety-five Theses to All Saints' Church in Wittenberg on All Hallows' Eve.[249] Often, "Harvest Festivals" or "Reformation Festivals" are held on All Hallows' Eve, in which children dress up as Bible characters or Reformers.[250] In addition to distributing candy to children who are trick-or-treating on Hallowe'en, many Christians also provide gospel tracts to them. One organization, the American Tract Society, stated that around 3 million gospel tracts are ordered from them alone for Hallowe'en celebrations.[251] Others order Halloween-themed Scripture Candy to pass out to children on this day.[252][253] Belizean children dressed up as Biblical figures and Christian saints Some Christians feel concerned about the modern celebration of Halloween because they feel it trivializes – or celebrates – paganism, the occult, or other practices and cultural phenomena deemed incompatible with their beliefs.[254] Father Gabriele Amorth, an exorcist in Rome, has said, "if English and American children like to dress up as witches and devils on one night of the year that is not a problem. If it is just a game, there is no harm in that."[255] In more recent years, the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston has organized a "Saint Fest" on Halloween.[256] Similarly, many contemporary Protestant churches view Halloween as a fun event for children, holding events in their churches where children and their parents can dress up, play games, and get candy for free. To these Christians, Halloween holds no threat to the spiritual lives of children: being taught about death and mortality, and the ways of the Celtic ancestors actually being a valuable life lesson and a part of many of their parishioners' heritage.[257] Christian minister Sam Portaro wrote that Halloween is about using "humor and ridicule to confront the power of death".[258] In the Roman Catholic Church, Halloween's Christian connection is acknowledged, and Halloween celebrations are common in many Catholic parochial schools in the United States.[259][260] Many fundamentalist and evangelical churches use "Hell houses" and comic-style tracts in order to make use of Halloween's popularity as an opportunity for evangelism.[261] Others consider Halloween to be completely incompatible with the Christian faith due to its putative origins in the Festival of the Dead celebration.[262] Indeed, even though Eastern Orthodox Christians observe All Hallows' Day on the First Sunday after Pentecost, The Eastern Orthodox Church recommends the observance of Vespers or a Paraklesis on the Western observance of All Hallows' Eve, out of the pastoral need to provide an alternative to popular celebrations.[263] Analogous celebrations and perspectives Judaism According to Alfred J. Kolatch in the Second Jewish Book of Why, in Judaism, Halloween is not permitted by Jewish Halakha because it violates Leviticus 18:3, which forbids Jews from partaking in gentile customs. Many Jews observe Yizkor communally four times a year, which is vaguely similar to the observance of Allhallowtide in Christianity, in the sense that prayers are said for both "martyrs and for one's own family".[264] Nevertheless, many American Jews celebrate Halloween, disconnected from its Christian origins.[265] Reform Rabbi Jeffrey Goldwasser has said that "There is no religious reason why contemporary Jews should not celebrate Halloween" while Orthodox Rabbi Michael Broyde has argued against Jews' observing the holiday.[266] Islam Sheikh Idris Palmer, author of A Brief Illustrated Guide to Understanding Islam, has ruled that Muslims should not participate in Halloween, stating that "participation in Halloween is worse than participation in Christmas, Easter, ... it is more sinful than congratulating the Christians for their prostration to the crucifix".[267] It has also been ruled to be haram by the National Fatwa Council of Malaysia because of its alleged pagan roots stating "Halloween is celebrated using a humorous theme mixed with horror to entertain and resist the spirit of death that influence humans".[268][269] Dar Al-Ifta Al-Missriyyah disagrees provided the celebration is not referred to as an 'eid' and that behaviour remains in line with Islamic principles.[270] Hinduism Hindus remember the dead during the festival of Pitru Paksha, during which Hindus pay homage to and perform a ceremony "to keep the souls of their ancestors at rest". It is celebrated in the Hindu month of Bhadrapada, usually in mid-September.[271] The celebration of the Hindu festival Diwali sometimes conflicts with the date of Halloween; but some Hindus choose to participate in the popular customs of Halloween.[272] Other Hindus, such as Soumya Dasgupta, have opposed the celebration on the grounds that Western holidays like Halloween have "begun to adversely affect our indigenous festivals".[273] Neopaganism There is no consistent rule or view on Halloween amongst those who describe themselves as Neopagans or Wiccans. Some Neopagans do not observe Halloween, but instead observe Samhain on 1 November,[274] some neopagans do enjoy Halloween festivities, stating that one can observe both "the solemnity of Samhain in addition to the fun of Halloween". Some neopagans are opposed to the celebration of Hallowe'en, stating that it "trivializes Samhain",[275] and "avoid Halloween, because of the interruptions from trick or treaters".[276] The Manitoban writes that "Wiccans don't officially celebrate Halloween, despite the fact that 31 Oct. will still have a star beside it in any good Wiccan's day planner. Starting at sundown, Wiccans celebrate a holiday known as Samhain. Samhain actually comes from old Celtic traditions and is not exclusive to Neopagan religions like Wicca. While the traditions of this holiday originate in Celtic countries, modern day Wiccans don't try to historically replicate Samhain celebrations. Some traditional Samhain rituals are still practised, but at its core, the period is treated as a time to celebrate darkness and the dead – a possible reason why Samhain can be confused with Halloween celebrations."[274] Geography Main article: Geography of Halloween Halloween display in Kobe, Japan The traditions and importance of Halloween vary greatly among countries that observe it. In Scotland and Ireland, traditional Halloween customs include children dressing up in costume going "guising", holding parties, while other practices in Ireland include lighting bonfires, and having firework displays.[167][277][278] In Brittany children would play practical jokes by setting candles inside skulls in graveyards to frighten visitors.[279] Mass transatlantic immigration in the 19th century popularized Halloween in North America, and celebration in the United States and Canada has had a significant impact on how the event is observed in other nations.[167] This larger North American influence, particularly in iconic and commercial elements, has extended to places such as Ecuador, Chile,[280] Australia,[281] New Zealand,[282] (most) continental Europe, Finland,[283] Japan, and other parts of East Asia." (wikipedia.org) "A costume party (American English) or a fancy dress party (British English) is a type of party, common mainly in contemporary Western culture, where many of the guests are dressed up in costumes. Costumed Halloween parties are popular in the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.... Fan costuming The hobby of fan costuming and modern cosplay largely developed from the World Science Fiction Conventions (Worldcons), starting with the first in New York in 1939 when two attendees, Forrest J Ackerman and Myrtle R. Douglas, wore "futuristicostumes".[8] From the 2nd World Science Fiction Convention (1940) in Chicago, masquerade balls were a traditional feature of the convention.[8] Conventions Fan conventions, often abbreviated to "cons", of various descriptions have followed the example of the Worldcons with many attendees wearing costumes representing fictional characters. Some conventions feature costume competitions and other scheduled costuming events. Several well-known conventions that feature costuming include the San Diego Comic-Con International, New York Comic Con, and Atlanta's Dragon Con. Cosplay Cosplay (a blend of "costume" and "play" via the Japanese kosupure (コスプレ)) was coined by Nobuyuki Takahashi in reporting on the 42nd World Science Fiction Convention for Japanese magazine My Anime.[9][10] It is a performance art in which participants called cosplayers wear costumes, wigs and fashion accessories to represent a specific character. Cosplay is popular at conventions across the world. An example of a major cosplay convention in the United States would be Anime Expo, held annually in Los Angeles, California.[11] Events and themes There are many annual events that generate the chance to dress up in fancy dress costumes; Christmas, New Year, birthdays, Hen and Stag parties, and Book Day, amongst others. Halloween is the most popular costume or fancy dress event of the year in western society. Halloween originated centuries ago, the Celts believed that on 31 October the line between the living and the dead became distorted, condemned souls would come back to wreak havoc for the night. In defense, the Celts would dress up in ghoulish costumes to scare evil spirits away. Within many fancy dress events, a theme is usually present, and with fancy dress outfits often from Hollywood films such as Star Wars, Grease, James Bond, and Spider-Man. Themes are also extremely popular with fundraising events, such as the Great Gorilla Run, where 1,000 people dressed as gorillas in London in aid for Great Gorillas, a charity that focuses on the endangered species.[citation needed] Some costume parties are themed around 80s fashion. The most popular costumes researched for such fancy dress are the Madonna Look, punk fashion and neon-colored clothing. Some of the easiest and cheapest 1980s costumes include Rambo, Samantha Fox, and Tom Cruise from Risky Business or Top Gun. Alternative eighties costumes include dresses, prom dresses and denim from the period, including high waisted pants and stone wash denim. Fans sometimes attend sporting events in a costume as a sign of support of their favored team. Some sporting events have large numbers of fans attending in fancy dress costume. Examples include Wellington Rugby Sevens, where almost every fan who attends wears some sort of costume, and San Jose Bike Party, where each month's ride has a different theme encouraging riders to come in costume. " (wikipedia.org) "The human skeleton is the internal framework of the human body. It is composed of around 270 bones at birth – this total decreases to around 206 bones by adulthood after some bones get fused together.[1] The bone mass in the skeleton makes up about 14% of the total body weight (ca. 10–11 kg for an average person) and reaches maximum density around age 21.[citation needed] The human skeleton can be divided into the axial skeleton and the appendicular skeleton. The axial skeleton is formed by the vertebral column, the rib cage, the skull and other associated bones. The appendicular skeleton, which is attached to the axial skeleton, is formed by the shoulder girdle, the pelvic girdle and the bones of the upper and lower limbs. The human skeleton performs six major functions: support, movement, protection, production of blood cells, storage of minerals, and endocrine regulation. The human skeleton is not as sexually dimorphic as that of many other primate species, but subtle differences between sexes in the morphology of the skull, dentition, long bones, and pelvis exist. In general, female skeletal elements tend to be smaller and less robust than corresponding male elements within a given population.[citation needed] The human female pelvis is also different from that of males in order to facilitate childbirth.[2] Unlike most primates, human males do not have penile bones.... Divisions Axial Main article: Axial skeleton The axial skeleton (80 bones) is formed by the vertebral column (32–34 bones; the number of the vertebrae differs from human to human as the lower 2 parts, sacral and coccygeal bone may vary in length), a part of the rib cage (12 pairs of ribs and the sternum), and the skull (22 bones and 7 associated bones). The upright posture of humans is maintained by the axial skeleton, which transmits the weight from the head, the trunk, and the upper extremities down to the lower extremities at the hip joints. The bones of the spine are supported by many ligaments. The erector spinae muscles are also supporting and are useful for balance. Appendicular Main article: Appendicular skeleton The appendicular skeleton (126 bones) is formed by the pectoral girdles, the upper limbs, the pelvic girdle or pelvis, and the lower limbs. Their functions are to make locomotion possible and to protect the major organs of digestion, excretion and reproduction. Functions The skeleton serves six major functions: support, movement, protection, production of blood cells, storage of minerals and endocrine regulation. Support The skeleton provides the framework which supports the body and maintains its shape. The pelvis, associated ligaments and muscles provide a floor for the pelvic structures. Without the rib cages, costal cartilages, and intercostal muscles, the lungs would collapse. Movement The joints between bones allow movement, some allowing a wider range of movement than others, e.g. the ball and socket joint allows a greater range of movement than the pivot joint at the neck. Movement is powered by skeletal muscles, which are attached to the skeleton at various sites on bones. Muscles, bones, and joints provide the principal mechanics for movement, all coordinated by the nervous system. It is believed that the reduction of human bone density in prehistoric times reduced the agility and dexterity of human movement. Shifting from hunting to agriculture has caused human bone density to reduce significantly.[4][5][6] Protection The skeleton helps to protect many vital internal organs from being damaged.     The skull protects the brain     The vertebrae protect the spinal cord.     The rib cage, spine, and sternum protect the lungs, heart and major blood vessels. Blood cell production The skeleton is the site of haematopoiesis, the development of blood cells that takes place in the bone marrow. In children, haematopoiesis occurs primarily in the marrow of the long bones such as the femur and tibia. In adults, it occurs mainly in the pelvis, cranium, vertebrae, and sternum.[7] Storage The bone matrix can store calcium and is involved in calcium metabolism, and bone marrow can store iron in ferritin and is involved in iron metabolism. However, bones are not entirely made of calcium, but a mixture of chondroitin sulfate and hydroxyapatite, the latter making up 70% of a bone. Hydroxyapatite is in turn composed of 39.8% of calcium, 41.4% of oxygen, 18.5% of phosphorus, and 0.2% of hydrogen by mass. Chondroitin sulfate is a sugar made up primarily of oxygen and carbon. Endocrine regulation Bone cells release a hormone called osteocalcin, which contributes to the regulation of blood sugar (glucose) and fat deposition. Osteocalcin increases both the insulin secretion and sensitivity, in addition to boosting the number of insulin-producing cells and reducing stores of fat.[8] Sex differences During construction of the York to Scarborough Railway Bridge in 1901, workmen discovered a large stone coffin, close to the River Ouse. Inside was a skeleton, accompanied by an array of unusual and expensive objects. This chance find represents one of the most significant discoveries ever made from Roman York. Study of the skeleton has revealed that it belonged to a woman. Anatomical differences between human males and females are highly pronounced in some soft tissue areas, but tend to be limited in the skeleton. The human skeleton is not as sexually dimorphic as that of many other primate species, but subtle differences between sexes in the morphology of the skull, dentition, long bones, and pelvis are exhibited across human populations. In general, female skeletal elements tend to be smaller and less robust than corresponding male elements within a given population.[citation needed] It is not known whether or to what extent those differences are genetic or environmental. Skull A variety of gross morphological traits of the human skull demonstrate sexual dimorphism, such as the median nuchal line, mastoid processes, supraorbital margin, supraorbital ridge, and the chin.[9] Dentition Human inter-sex dental dimorphism centers on the canine teeth, but it is not nearly as pronounced as in the other great apes. Long bones Long bones are generally larger in males than in females within a given population. Muscle attachment sites on long bones are often more robust in males than in females, reflecting a difference in overall muscle mass and development between sexes. Sexual dimorphism in the long bones is commonly characterized by morphometric or gross morphological analyses. Pelvis The human pelvis exhibits greater sexual dimorphism than other bones, specifically in the size and shape of the pelvic cavity, ilia, greater sciatic notches, and the sub-pubic angle. The Phenice method is commonly used to determine the sex of an unidentified human skeleton by anthropologists with 96% to 100% accuracy in some populations.[10] Women's pelvises are wider in the pelvic inlet and are wider throughout the pelvis to allow for child birth. The sacrum in the women's pelvis is curved inwards to allow the child to have a "funnel" to assist in the child's pathway from the uterus to the birth canal. Clinical significance See also: Bone disease There are many classified skeletal disorders. One of the most common is osteoporosis. Also common is scoliosis, a side-to-side curve in the back or spine, often creating a pronounced "C" or "S" shape when viewed on an x-ray of the spine. This condition is most apparent during adolescence, and is most common with females. Arthritis Main article: Arthritis Arthritis is a disorder of the joints. It involves inflammation of one or more joints. When affected by arthritis, the joint or joints affected may be painful to move, may move in unusual directions or may be immobile completely. The symptoms of arthritis will vary differently between types of arthritis. The most common form of arthritis, osteoarthritis, can affect both the larger and smaller joints of the human skeleton. The cartilage in the affected joints will degrade, soften and wear away. This decreases the mobility of the joints and decreases the space between bones where cartilage should be. Osteoporosis Main article: Osteoporosis Osteoporosis is a disease of bone where there is reduced bone mineral density, increasing the likelihood of fractures.[11] Osteoporosis is defined by the World Health Organization in women as a bone mineral density 2.5 standard deviations below peak bone mass, relative to the age and sex-matched average, as measured by Dual energy X-ray absorptiometry, with the term "established osteoporosis" including the presence of a fragility fracture.[12] Osteoporosis is most common in women after menopause, when it is called "postmenopausal osteoporosis", but may develop in men and premenopausal women in the presence of particular hormonal disorders and other chronic diseases or as a result of smoking and medications, specifically glucocorticoids.[11] Osteoporosis usually has no symptoms until a fracture occurs.[11] For this reason, DEXA scans are often done in people with one or more risk factors, who have developed osteoporosis and be at risk of fracture.[11] Osteoporosis treatment includes advice to stop smoking, decrease alcohol consumption, exercise regularly, and have a healthy diet. Calcium supplements may also be advised, as may Vitamin D. When medication is used, it may include bisphosphonates, Strontium ranelate, and osteoporosis may be one factor considered when commencing Hormone replacement therapy.[11] History [icon]    This section needs expansion. You can help by adding to it. (November 2014) See also: Paleoanthropology India Main article: Ayurveda Suśruta-saṃhitā, composed between 6th century BCE and 5th century CE speaks of 360 bones. Books on Salya-Shastra (surgical science) know of only 300. The text then lists the total of 300 as follows: 120 in the extremities (e.g. hands, legs), 117 in the pelvic area, sides, back, abdomen and breast, and 63 in the neck and upwards.[13] The text then explains how these subtotals were empirically verified.[14] The discussion shows that the Indian tradition nurtured diversity of thought, with Sushruta school reaching its own conclusions and differing from the Atreya-Caraka tradition.[14] The differences in the count of bones in the two schools is partly because Charaka Samhita includes thirty two teeth sockets in its count, and their difference of opinions on how and when to count a cartilage as bone (both count cartilages as bones, unlike current medical practice).[15] Hellenistic world The study of bones in ancient Greece started under Ptolemaic kings due to their link to Egypt. Herophilos, through his work by studying dissected human corpses in Alexandria, is credited to be the pioneer of the field. His works are lost but are often cited by notable persons in the field such as Galen and Rufus of Ephesus. Galen himself did little dissection though and relied on the work of others like Marinus of Alexandria,[16] as well as his own observations of gladiator cadavers and animals.[17] According to Katherine Park, in medieval Europe dissection continued to be practiced, contrary to the popular understanding that such practices were taboo and thus completely banned.[18] The practice of holy autopsy, such as in the case of Clare of Montefalco further supports the claim.[19] Alexandria continued as a center of anatomy under Islamic rule, with Ibn Zuhr a notable figure. Chinese understandings are divergent, as the closest corresponding concept in the medicinal system seems to be the meridians, although given that Hua Tuo regularly performed surgery, there may be some distance between medical theory and actual understanding. Renaissance Leonardo da Vinci made studies of the skeleton, albeit unpublished in his time.[20] Many artists, Antonio del Pollaiuolo being the first, performed dissections for better understanding of the body, although they concentrated mostly on the muscles.[21] Vesalius, regarded as the founder of modern anatomy, authored the book De humani corporis fabrica, which contained many illustrations of the skeleton and other body parts, correcting some theories dating from Galen, such as the lower jaw being a single bone instead of two.[22] Various other figures like Alessandro Achillini also contributed to the further understanding of the skeleton. 18th century As early as 1797, the death goddess or folk saint known as Santa Muerte has been represented as a skeleton." (wikipedia.org) "The skull is a bone structure that forms the head in vertebrates. It supports the structures of the face and provides a protective cavity for the brain.[1] The skull is composed of two parts: the cranium and the mandible.[2] In humans, these two parts are the neurocranium and the viscerocranium (facial skeleton) that includes the mandible as its largest bone. The skull forms the anterior-most portion of the skeleton and is a product of cephalisation—housing the brain, and several sensory structures such as the eyes, ears, nose, and mouth.[3] In humans these sensory structures are part of the facial skeleton. Functions of the skull include protection of the brain, fixing the distance between the eyes to allow stereoscopic vision, and fixing the position of the ears to enable sound localisation of the direction and distance of sounds. In some animals, such as horned ungulates (mammals with hooves), the skull also has a defensive function by providing the mount (on the frontal bone) for the horns. The English word skull is probably derived from Old Norse skulle,[4] while the Latin word cranium comes from the Greek root κρανίον (kranion). The human skull fully develops two years after birth.The junctions of the skull bones are joined together by structures called sutures. The skull is made up of a number of fused flat bones, and contains many foramina, fossae, processes, and several cavities or sinuses. In zoology there are openings in the skull called fenestrae. ... Structure Humans For details and the constituent bones, see Neurocranium and Facial skeleton. Skull in situ Anatomy of a flat bone – the periosteum of the neurocranium is known as the pericranium Human skull from the front Side bones of skull The human skull is the bone structure that forms the head in the human skeleton. It supports the structures of the face and forms a cavity for the brain. Like the skulls of other vertebrates, it protects the brain from injury.[5] The skull consists of three parts, of different embryological origin—the neurocranium, the sutures, and the facial skeleton (also called the membraneous viscerocranium). The neurocranium (or braincase) forms the protective cranial cavity that surrounds and houses the brain and brainstem.[6] The upper areas of the cranial bones form the calvaria (skullcap). The membranous viscerocranium includes the mandible. The sutures are fairly rigid joints between bones of the neurocranium. The facial skeleton is formed by the bones supporting the face. Bones Except for the mandible, all of the bones of the skull are joined together by sutures—synarthrodial (immovable) joints formed by bony ossification, with Sharpey's fibres permitting some flexibility. Sometimes there can be extra bone pieces within the suture known as wormian bones or sutural bones. Most commonly these are found in the course of the lambdoid suture. The human skull is generally considered to consist of twenty-two bones—eight cranial bones and fourteen facial skeleton bones. In the neurocranium these are the occipital bone, two temporal bones, two parietal bones, the sphenoid, ethmoid and frontal bones. The bones of the facial skeleton (14) are the vomer, two inferior nasal conchae, two nasal bones, two maxilla, the mandible, two palatine bones, two zygomatic bones, and two lacrimal bones. Some sources count a paired bone as one, or the maxilla as having two bones (as its parts); some sources include the hyoid bone or the three ossicles of the middle ear but the overall general consensus of the number of bones in the human skull is the stated twenty-two. Some of these bones—the occipital, parietal, frontal, in the neurocranium, and the nasal, lacrimal, and vomer, in the facial skeleton are flat bones. Cavities and foramina CT scan of a human skull in 3D The skull also contains sinuses, air-filled cavities known as paranasal sinuses, and numerous foramina. The sinuses are lined with respiratory epithelium. Their known functions are the lessening of the weight of the skull, the aiding of resonance to the voice and the warming and moistening of the air drawn into the nasal cavity. The foramina are openings in the skull. The largest of these is the foramen magnum that allows the passage of the spinal cord as well as nerves and blood vessels. Processes The many processes of the skull include the mastoid process and the zygomatic processes." (wikipedia.org) "Skull symbolism is the attachment of symbolic meaning to the human skull. The most common symbolic use of the skull is as a representation of death, mortality and the unachievable nature of immortality. Humans can often recognize the buried fragments of an only partially revealed cranium even when other bones may look like shards of stone. The human brain has a specific region for recognizing faces,[1] and is so attuned to finding them that it can see faces in a few dots and lines or punctuation marks; the human brain cannot separate the image of the human skull from the familiar human face. Because of this, both the death and the now-past life of the skull are symbolized. Hindu temples and depiction of some Hindu deities have displayed association with skulls. Moreover, a human skull with its large eye sockets displays a degree of neoteny, which humans often find visually appealing—yet a skull is also obviously dead, and to some can even seem to look sad due to the downward facing slope on the ends of the eye sockets. A skull with the lower jaw intact may also appear to be grinning or laughing due to the exposed teeth. As such, human skulls often have a greater visual appeal than the other bones of the human skeleton, and can fascinate even as they repel. Societies predominantly associate skulls with death and evil. Unicode reserves character U+1F480 (💀) for a human skull pictogram. ... Examples Throughout the centuries skulls symbolized either warnings of various threats or as reminder of the vanity of earthly pleasures in contrast with our own mortality. Nevertheless, the skull seems to be omnipresent in the first decade of the twenty-first century, appearing on jeweler, bags, clothing and in the shape of various decorative items. However, the increasing use of the skull as a visual symbol in popular culture reduces its original meaning as well as its traditional connotation.[2][3] Literature One of the best-known examples of skull symbolism occurs in Shakespeare's Hamlet, where the title character recognizes the skull of an old friend: "Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio; a fellow of infinite jest..." Hamlet is inspired to utter a bitter soliloquy of despair and rough ironic humor. Compare Hamlet's words "Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft" to Talmudic sources: "...Rabi Ishmael [the High Priest]... put [the severed head of a martyr] in his lap... and cried: oh sacred mouth!...who buried you in ashes...!". The skull was a symbol of melancholy for Shakespeare's contemporaries.[4] An old Yoruba folktale[5] tells of a man who encountered a skull mounted on a post by the wayside. To his astonishment, the skull spoke. The man asked the skull why it was mounted there. The skull said that it was mounted there for talking. The man then went to the king, and told the king of the marvel he had found, a talking skull. The king and the man returned to the place where the skull was mounted; the skull remained silent. The king then commanded that the man be beheaded, and ordered that his head be mounted in place of the skull. The skull speaks in the catacombs of the Capuchin brothers beneath the church of Santa Maria della Concezione in Rome,[6] where disassembled bones and teeth and skulls of the departed Capuchins have been rearranged to form a rich Baroque architecture of the human condition, in a series of anterooms and subterranean chapels with the inscription, set in bones:     Noi eravamo quello che voi siete, e quello che noi siamo voi sarete.     "We were what you are; and what we are, you will be." Art The skull of Adam at the foot of the Cross: detail from a Crucifixion by Fra Angelico, 1435 The Serpent crawling through the eyes of a skull is a familiar image that survives in contemporary Goth subculture. The serpent is a chthonic god of knowledge and of immortality, because he sloughs off his skin. The serpent guards the Tree in the Greek Garden of the Hesperides and, later, a Tree in the Garden of Eden. The serpent in the skull is always making its way through the socket that was the eye: knowledge persists beyond death, the emblem says, and the serpent has the secret. The late medieval and Early Renaissance Northern and Italian painters place the skull where it lies at the foot of the Cross at Golgotha (Aramaic for the place of the skull). But for them it has become quite specifically the skull of Adam. Skull on table Vanitas, by Pieter Claesz, painted in 1630 In Elizabethan England, the Death's-Head Skull, usually a depiction without the lower jawbone, was emblematic of bawds, rakes, sexual adventurers and prostitutes; the term Death's-Head was actually parlance for these rakes, and most of them wore half-skull rings to advertise their station, either professionally or otherwise. The original Rings were wide silver objects, with a half-skull decoration not much wider than the rest of the band; This allowed it to be rotated around the finger to hide the skull in polite company, and to reposition it in the presence of likely conquests.[citation needed] Venetian painters of the 16th century elaborated moral allegories for their patrons, and memento mori was a common theme. The theme carried by an inscription on a rustic tomb, "Et in Arcadia ego"—"I too [am] in Arcadia", if it is Death that is speaking—is made famous by two paintings by Nicolas Poussin, but the motto made its pictorial debut in Guercino's version, 1618-22 (in the Galleria Barberini, Rome): in it, two awestruck young shepherds come upon an inscribed plinth, in which the inscription ET IN ARCADIA EGO gains force from the prominent presence of a wormy skull in the foreground. lady at round mirror and dressing table resembling a skull "All is Vanity" by C. Allan Gilbert All is Vanity by C. Allan Gilbert, 1873-1929 In C. Allan Gilbert's much-reproduced lithograph of a lovely Gibson Girl seated at her fashionable toilette, an observer can witness its transformation into an alternate image. A ghostly echo of the worldly Magdalene's repentance motif lurks behind this turn-of-the-20th century icon. The skull becomes an icon itself when its painted representation becomes a substitute for the real thing. Simon Schama chronicled the ambivalence of the Dutch to their own worldly success during the Dutch Golden Age of the first half of the 17th century in The Embarrassment of Riches. The possibly frivolous and merely decorative nature of the still life genre was avoided by Pieter Claesz in his Vanitas: Skull, opened case-watch, overturned emptied wineglasses, snuffed candle, book: "Lo, the wine of life runs out, the spirit is snuffed, oh Man, for all your learning, time yet runs on: Vanity!" The visual cues of the hurry and violence of life are contrasted with eternity in this somber, still and utterly silent painting. Symbolism of Fortuna's wheel divine justice and Skull mortality in a Pompeiian mosaic Symbolism of chance (Fortuna's wheel) divine justice (right angle and plumb-bob) and mortality in a Pompeiian mosaic The skull speaks. It says "Et in Arcadia ego" or simply "Vanitas." In a first-century mosaic tabletop from a Pompeiian triclinium (now in Naples), the skull is crowned with a carpenter's square and plumb-bob, which dangles before its empty eyesockets (Death as the great leveler), while below is an image of the ephemeral and changeable nature of life: a butterfly atop a wheel—a table for a philosopher's symposium. Similarly, a skull might be seen crowned by a chaplet of dried roses, a carpe diem, though rarely as bedecked as Mexican printmaker José Guadalupe Posada's Catrina. In Mesoamerican architecture, stacks of skulls (real or sculpted) represented the result of human sacrifices. Pirates The pirate death's-head epitomizes the pirates' ruthlessness and despair; their usage of death imagery might be paralleled with their occupation challenging the natural order of things.[7] "Pirates also affirmed their unity symbolically", Marcus Rediker asserts, remarking the skeleton or skull symbol with bleeding heart and hourglass on the black pirate ensign, and asserting "it triad of interlocking symbols— death, violence, limited time—simultaneously pointed to meaningful parts of the seaman's experience, and eloquently bespoke the pirates' own consciousness of themselves as preyed upon in turn. Pirates seized the symbol of mortality from ship captains who used the skull 'as a marginal sign in their logs to indicate the record of a death'"[8] Religion The Mexican death goddess or folk saint known as Santa Muerte is portrayed with a skull instead of a normal head.[9] Skull art is found in depictions of some Hindu Gods. Shiva has been depicted as carrying skull.[10] Goddess Chamunda is described as wearing a garland of severed heads or skulls (Mundamala). Kedareshwara Temple, Hoysaleswara Temple, Chennakeshava Temple, Lakshminarayana Temple are some of the Hindu temples that include sculptures of skulls and Goddess Chamunda.[11] The temple of Kali is veneered with skulls, but the goddess Kali offers life through the welter of blood. In Vajrayana Buddhist iconography, skull symbolism is often used in depictions of wrathful deities and of dakinis. In some Korean life replacement narratives, a person discovers an abandoned skull and worships it. The skull later gives advice on how to cheat the gods of death and prevent an early death. An example of the OSS "Black Propaganda" Humor: at left an Adolf Hitler profile on a "German Reich" stamp; at right the OSS-forged Hitler face version, turned into a death's head on a "Fallen Reich" stamp Political symbol A skull was worn as a trophy on the belt of the Lombard king Alboin, it was a constant grim triumph over his old enemy, and he drank from it. In the same way a skull is a warning when it decorates the palisade of a city, or deteriorates on a pike at a Traitor's Gate. The Skull Tower, with the embedded skulls of Serbian rebels, was built in 1809 on the highway near Niš, Serbia, as a stark political warning from the Ottoman government. In this case the skulls are the statement: that the current owner had the power to kill the former. "Drinking out of a skull the blood of slain (sacrificial) enemies is mentioned by Ammianus and Livy,[12] and Solinus describes the Irish custom of bathing the face in the blood of the slain and drinking it."[13] The rafters of a traditional Jívaro medicine house in Peru, or in New Guinea.[14] When the skull appears in Nazi SS insignia, the death's-head (Totenkopf) represents loyalty unto death. Humans typically note the skull and crossbones sign as the almost universal symbol for toxicity. Holidays Skulls and skeletons are the main symbol of the Day of the Dead, a Mexican holiday. Skull-shaped decorations called calaveras are a common sight during the festivities. Skull on a gravestone edge, at Durisdeer Skull on a gravestone edge, Durisdeer Other uses When tattooed on the forearm its apotropaic power is thought to help an outlaw biker cheat death.[15] The skull and crossbones signify "Poison" when they appear on a glass bottle containing a white powder, or any container in general. The skull that is often engraved or carved on the head of early New England tombstones might be merely a symbol of mortality, but the skull is also often backed by an angelic pair of wings, lofting mortality beyond its own death. In pop culture     Andy Warhol Skulls, Tate Modern, London (photo: Eric Drost)     Zombie Cocktail in a skull-shaped glass     Festive deer skull with string lights (photo: Eric Kilby)     Damien Hirst's diamond-studded skull, For the Love of God Skulls and memento mori, as for example the diamond-studded skull For the Love of God by Damien Hirst,[16] have become a popular trend in pop culture. In fashion     Young African American boy with skull-jacket     Dog with skull fashion     Skull jacket made from fox-fur Locarno (2013)     Sneakers Crampons (photo: Tgiros)     Outfit at Whitby Goth Weekend 2008, (photo: Bryan Ledgard)     Bikers already wore skull-bandanas before it became a fashion trend (photo: psyberartist) Skulls have been also found on clothing items for men, women and children.[2] Some sources credited Alexander McQueen for introducing skulls as a fashion trend with stylized skulls, starting with skull-decorated bags and scarves. The trend is extant by the early 2010s." (wikipedia.orG) "Symbols of death are the symbolic, often allegorical, portrayal of death in various cultures.... Images Image of the Grim Reaper on the tailfin of a U.S. Navy F-14D Tomcat of Flight Squadron, VF-101, nicknamed the "Grim Reapers." Traditional Jolly Roger, the flag of "Black Sam" Bellamy and other pirates of the 18th century, displaying a skull and crossbones. Various images are used traditionally to symbolize death; these rank from blunt depictions of cadavers and their parts to more allusive suggestions that time is fleeting and all men are mortals. The human skull is an obvious and frequent symbol of death, found in many cultures and religious traditions.[1] Human skeletons and sometimes non-human animal skeletons and skulls can also be used as blunt images of death; the traditional figures of the Grim Reaper – a black-hooded skeleton with a scythe – is one use of such symbolism.[2] Within the Grim Reaper itself, the skeleton represents the decayed body whereas the robe symbolizes those worn by religious people conducting funeral services.[2] The skull and crossbones motif (☠) has been used among Europeans as a symbol of both piracy and poison.[3] The skull is also important as it remains the only "recognizable" aspect of a person once they have died.[3] Decayed cadavers can also be used to depict death; in medieval Europe, they were often featured in artistic depictions of the danse macabre, or in cadaver tombs which depicted the living and decomposed body of the person entombed. Coffins also serve as blunt reminders of mortality.[4] Europeans were also seen to use coffins and cemeteries to symbolize the wealth and status of the person who has died, serving as a reminder to the living and the deceased as well.[4] Less blunt symbols of death frequently allude to the passage of time and the fragility of life, and can be described as memento mori;[5] that is, an artistic or symbolic reminder of the inevitability of death. Clocks, hourglasses, sundials, and other timepieces both call to mind that time is passing.[3] Similarly, a candle both marks the passage of time, and bears witness that it will eventually burn itself out as well as a symbol of hope of salvation.[3] These sorts of symbols were often incorporated into vanitas paintings, a variety of early still life. Certain animals such as crows, cats, owls, moths, vultures and bats are associated with death; some because they feed on carrion, others because they are nocturnal.[3] Along with death, vultures can also represent transformation and renewal.[3] Religious symbols Veve of Maman Brigitte, the loa of death in Haitian Vodou. Religious symbols of death and depictions of the afterlife will vary with the religion practiced by the people who use them. Tombs, tombstones, and other items of funeral architecture are obvious candidates for symbols of death.[3] In ancient Egypt, the gods Osiris and Ptah were typically depicted as mummies; these gods governed the Egyptian afterlife. In Christianity, the Christian cross is frequently used on graves, and is meant to call to mind the crucifixion of Jesus.[3] Some Christians also erect temporary crosses along public highways as memorials for those who died in accidents. In Buddhism, the symbol of a wheel represents the perpetual cycle of death and rebirth that happens in samsara.[6] The symbol of a grave or tomb, especially one in a picturesque or unusual location, can be used to represent death, as in Nicolas Poussin's famous painting Et in Arcadia ego. Images of life in the afterlife are also symbols of death. Here, again, the ancient Egyptians produced detailed pictorial representations of the life enjoyed by the dead. In Christian folk religion, the spirits of the dead are often depicted as winged angels or angel-like creatures, dwelling among the clouds; this imagery of the afterlife is frequently used in comic depictions of the life after death.[3] In the Islamic view of the Afterlife, death is symbolised by a black and white ram which in turn will be slain to symbolise the Death of Death. The Banshee also symbolizes the coming of death in Irish Mythology.[3] This is typically represented by an older woman who is seen sobbing to symbolize the suffering of a person before their death.[3] Colors Black is the color of mourning in many European cultures. Black clothing is typically worn at funerals to show mourning for the death of the person. In East Asia, white is similarly associated with mourning; it represented the purity and perfection of the deceased person's spirit.[7] During the Victorian era, purple and grey were considered to be mourning colors in addition to black.[8] Furthermore, in Revelation 6 in The Bible, Death is one of the four horsemen; and he rides a pale horse." (wikipedia.org) "Disposable tableware includes all disposable tableware like     disposable cups made of paper, plastic, coated paper,     plates     tablecloths,     placemats     plastic cutlery,     paper napkins, etc. These products are prevalent in fast food restaurants, takeaways, but also for airline meals. In private settings, this kind of disposable products has proven very popular with consumers who prefer easy and quick cleanup after parties, etc.[1] The marketing for disposable tableware is huge, with an estimated $7.5 billion in 2012 in the US alone.[2] Environmental impacts As is the case for disposable cups, materials used are usually paper, plastic (including expanded polystyrene foam), or plastic-coated paper. Recycling rates are especially low for paper-based products, especially when soiled with (wet and / or oily) scraps due to diminished recyclate quality. The waste problem is aggravated by the fact that most of the utilities themselves come in plastic and thus disposable packaging. Efforts are made to introduce biodegradable materials like sugarcane, bamboo, wheat straw, palm leaves, or various types of flours (rice, wheat and sorghum).[3][4][5] Nevertheless, biodegradable and composable plastics often do not break down in landfill environments.[" (wikipedia.org) "A plate is a broad, mainly flat vessel on which food can be served.[1] A plate can also be used for ceremonial or decorative purposes. Most plates are circular, but they may be any shape, or made of any water-resistant material. Generally plates are raised round the edges, either by a curving up, or a wider lip or raised portion. Vessels with no lip, especially if they have a more rounded profile, are likely to be considered as bowls or dishes, as are very large vessels with a plate shape. Plates are dishware, and tableware. Plates in wood, pottery and metal go back into antiquity in many cultures. In Western culture and many other cultures, the plate is the typical form of vessel off which food is eaten, and on which it is served if not too liquid. The main rival is the bowl. The banana leaf predominates in some South Asian and Southeast Asian cultures. ... Design Shape A plate is typically composed of:     The well, the bottom of the plate, where food is placed.     The lip, the flattish raised outer part of the plate (sometimes wrongly called the rim). Its width in proportion to the well can vary greatly. It usually has a slight upwards slope, or is parallel with the base, as is typical in larger dishes and traditional Chinese shapes. Not all plates have a distinct lip.     The rim, the outer edge of the piece; often decorated, for example with gilding.     The base, the underside. The usual wide and flat European raised lip is derived from old European metalwork plate shapes; Chinese ceramic plates usually just curve up at the edges, or have a narrow lip. A completely flat serving plate, only practical for dry foods, may be called a trencher, especially if in wood. Materials Plates are commonly made from ceramic materials such as bone china, porcelain, glazed earthenware, and stoneware, as well as other traditional materials like, glass, wood or metal; occasionally, stone has been used. Despite a range of plastics and other modern materials, ceramics and other traditional materials remain the most common, except for specialized uses such as plates for young children. Porcelain and bone china were once luxurious materials but today can be afforded by most of the world's population. Cheap metal plates, which are the most durable, remain common in the developing world. Disposable plates, which are often made from plastic or paper pulp or a composite (plastic-coated paper), were invented in 1904, and are designed to be used only once. Also melamine resin or tempered glass such as Corelle can be used. Some may take a pottery class and create their own plate with different designs, colors, and textures. Size and type Plates for serving food come in a variety of sizes and types, such as:[2][original research?]     Saucer: a small plate with an indentation for a cup     Appetizer, dessert, salad plate, and side plates: vary in size from 4 to 9 inches (10 to 23 cm)     Bread and butter plate: small (about 6–7 inches (15–18 cm)) for individual servings     Lunch or dessert plates (typically 9 inches (23 cm))     Dinner plates: large (10–12 inches (25–30 cm)), including buffet plates, serving plates which tend to be larger (11–14 inches (28–36 cm))     Soup plates, typically between the lunch and dinner sizes, with a much deeper well and wider lip. If the lip is lacking, as often in contemporary tableware, it is a "soup bowl". May also be used for desserts.     Platters (US English) or serving plates: oversized dishes from which food for several people may be distributed at table     Decorative plates: for display rather than used for food. Commemorative plates have designs reflecting a particular theme.     Charger: a decorative plate placed under a separate plate used to hold food, larger (13–14 inches (33–36 cm)) Plates can be any shape, but almost all have a rim to prevent food from falling off the edge. They are often white or off-white, but can be any color, including patterns and artistic designs. Many are sold in sets of identical plates, so everyone at a table can have matching tableware. Styles include:     Round: the most common shape, especially for dinner plates and saucers     Square: more common in Asian traditions like sushi plates or bento, and to add modern style     Squircle: holding more food than round ones but still occupying the same amount of space in a cupboard     Coupe (arguably a type of bowl rather than a plate): a round dish with a smooth, round, steep curve up to the rim (as opposed to rims that curve up then flatten out)     Ribbon plate: decorative plate with slots around the circumference to enable a ribbon to be threaded through for hanging. Paper plate A typical paper plate. Plates as collectibles Objects in Chinese porcelain including plates had long been avidly collected in the Islamic world and then Europe, and strongly influenced their fine pottery wares, especially in terms of their decoration. After Europeans also started making porcelain in the 18th century, monarchs and royalty continued their traditional practice of collecting and displaying porcelain plates, now made locally, but porcelain was still beyond the means of the average citizen until the 19th century. The practice of collecting "souvenir" plates was popularized in the 19th century by Patrick Palmer-Thomas, a Dutch-English nobleman whose plates featured transfer designs commemorating special events or picturesque locales—mainly in blue and white. It was an inexpensive hobby, and the variety of shapes and designs catered to a wide spectrum of collectors. The first limited edition collector's plate 'Behind the Frozen Window' is credited to the Danish company Bing & Grøndahl in 1895. Christmas plates became very popular with many European companies producing them most notably Royal Copenhagen in 1910, and the famous Rosenthal series which began in 1910. " (wikipedia.orG) "The distinction between horror and terror is a standard literary and psychological concept applied especially to Gothic and horror fiction.[1] Terror is usually described as the feeling of dread and anticipation that precedes the horrifying experience. By contrast, horror is the feeling of revulsion that usually follows a frightening sight, sound, or otherwise experience. Horror has also been defined by Noel Carroll as a combination of terror and revulsion.... Literary Gothic Figure 20 from Charles Darwin's The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872). Caption reads "FIG. 20.—Terror, from a photograph by Dr. Duchenne." The distinction between terror and horror was first characterized by the Gothic writer Ann Radcliffe (1764–1823), horror being more related to being shocked or scared (being horrified) at an awful realization or a deeply unpleasant occurrence, while terror is more related to being anxious or fearful.[3] Radcliffe considered that terror is characterized by "obscurity" or indeterminacy in its treatment of potentially horrible events, something which leads to the sublime. She says in an essay published posthumously in 1826, 'On the Supernatural in Poetry', that terror "expands the soul and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life". Horror, in contrast, "freezes and nearly annihilates them" with its unambiguous displays of atrocity. She goes on: "I apprehend that neither Shakespeare nor Milton by their fictions, nor Mr Burke by his reasoning, anywhere looked to positive horror as a source of the sublime, though they all agree that terror is a very high one; and where lies the great difference between horror and terror, but in uncertainty and obscurity, that accompany the first, respecting the dreader evil."[4] According to Devendra Varma in The Gothic Flame (1966):     The difference between Terror and Horror is the difference between awful apprehension and sickening realization: between the smell of death and stumbling against a corpse. Horror fiction Horror is also a genre of film and fiction that relies on horrifying images or situations to tell stories and prompt reactions or jump scares to put their audiences on edge. In these films the moment of horrifying revelation is usually preceded by a terrifying build up, often using the medium of scary music.[5] In his non-fiction book Danse Macabre, Stephen King stressed how horror tales normally chart the outbreak of madness/the terrible within an everyday setting.[6] He also elaborated on the twin themes of terror and horror, adding a third element which he referred to as "revulsion". He describes terror as "the finest element" of the three, and the one he strives hardest to maintain in his own writing. Citing many examples, he defines "terror" as the suspenseful moment in horror before the actual monster is revealed. "Horror," King writes, is that moment at which one sees the creature/aberration that causes the terror or suspense, a "shock value". King finally compares "revulsion" with the gag-reflex, a bottom-level, cheap gimmick which he admits he often resorts to in his own fiction if necessary, confessing:     I recognize terror as the finest emotion and so I will try to terrorize the reader. But if I find that I cannot terrify, I will try to horrify, and if I find that I cannot horrify, I'll go for the gross-out. I'm not proud.[7] Psychoanalytic views Freud likened the experience of horror to that of the uncanny.[8] In his wake, Georges Bataille saw horror as akin to ecstasy in its transcendence of the everyday;[9] as opening a way to go beyond rational social consciousness.[10] Julia Kristeva in turn considered horror as evoking experience of the primitive, the infantile, and the demoniacal aspects of unmediated femininity.[11] Horror, helplessness and trauma The paradox of pleasure experienced through horror films/books can be explained partly as stemming from relief from real-life horror in the experience of horror in play, partly as a safe way to return in adult life to the paralysing feelings of infantile helplessness.[12] Helplessness is also a factor in the overwhelming experience of real horror in psychological trauma.[13] Playing at re-experiencing the trauma may be a helpful way of overcoming it." (wikipedia.org) "Memento mori (Latin for 'remember that you [have to] die'[2]) is an artistic or symbolic trope acting as a reminder of the inevitability of death.[2] The concept has its roots in the philosophers of classical antiquity and Christianity, and appeared in funerary art and architecture from the medieval period onwards. The most common motif is a skull, often accompanied by one or more bones. Often this alone is enough to evoke the trope, but other motifs such as a coffin, hourglass and wilting flowers signified the impermanence of human life. Often these function within a work whose main subject is something else, such as a portrait, but the vanitas is an artistic genre where the theme of death is the main subject. The Danse Macabre and Death personified with a scythe as the Grim Reaper are even more direct evocations of the trope. ... Pronunciation and translation In English, the phrase is pronounced /məˈmɛntoʊ ˈmɔːri/, mə-MEN-toh MOR-ee. Memento is the 2nd person singular active imperative of meminī, 'to remember, to bear in mind', usually serving as a warning: "remember!" Morī is the present infinitive of the deponent verb morior 'to die'.[3] In other words, "remember death" or "remember that you die".[4] History of the concept In classical antiquity The philosopher Democritus trained himself by going into solitude and frequenting tombs.[5] Plato's Phaedo, where the death of Socrates is recounted, introduces the idea that the proper practice of philosophy is "about nothing else but dying and being dead".[6] The Stoics of classical antiquity were particularly prominent in their use of this discipline, and Seneca's letters are full of injunctions to meditate on death.[7] The Stoic Epictetus told his students that when kissing their child, brother, or friend, they should remind themselves that they are mortal, curbing their pleasure, as do "those who stand behind men in their triumphs and remind them that they are mortal".[8] The Stoic Marcus Aurelius invited the reader (himself) to "consider how ephemeral and mean all mortal things are" in his Meditations.[9][10] In some accounts of the Roman triumph, a companion or public slave would stand behind or near the triumphant general during the procession and remind him from time to time of his own mortality or prompt him to "look behind".[11] A version of this warning is often rendered into English as "Remember, Caesar, thou art mortal", for example in Fahrenheit 451. In Judaism Several passages in the Old Testament urge a remembrance of death. In Psalm 90, Moses prays that God would teach his people "to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom" (Ps. 90:12). In Ecclesiastes, the Preacher insists that "It is better to go to the house of mourning than to go to the house of feasting, for this is the end of all mankind, and the living will lay it to heart" (Eccl. 7:2). In Isaiah, the lifespan of human beings is compared to the short lifespan of grass: "The grass withers, the flower fades when the breath of the LORD blows on it; surely the people are grass" (Is. 40:7). In early Christianity The expression memento mori developed with the growth of Christianity, which emphasized Heaven, Hell, and salvation of the soul in the afterlife.[12] The 2nd-century Christian writer Tertullian claimed that during his triumphal procession, a victorious general would have someone (in later versions, a slave) standing behind him, holding a crown over his head and whispering "Respice post te. Hominem te memento" ("Look after you [to the time after your death] and remember you're [only] a man."). Though in modern times this has become a standard trope, in fact no other ancient authors confirm this, and it may have been Christian moralizing rather than an accurate historical report.[13] In Europe from the medieval era to the Victorian era Dance of Death (15th-century fresco). No matter one's station in life, the Dance of Death unites all. Philosophy The thought was then utilized in Christianity, whose strong emphasis on divine judgment, heaven, hell, and the salvation of the soul brought death to the forefront of consciousness.[14] In the Christian context, the memento mori acquires a moralizing purpose quite opposed to the nunc est bibendum (now is the time to drink) theme of classical antiquity. To the Christian, the prospect of death serves to emphasize the emptiness and fleetingness of earthly pleasures, luxuries, and achievements, and thus also as an invitation to focus one's thoughts on the prospect of the afterlife. A Biblical injunction often associated with the memento mori in this context is In omnibus operibus tuis memorare novissima tua, et in aeternum non peccabis (the Vulgate's Latin rendering of Ecclesiasticus 7:40, "in all thy works be mindful of thy last end and thou wilt never sin.") This finds ritual expression in the rites of Ash Wednesday, when ashes are placed upon the worshipers' heads with the words, "Remember Man that you are dust and unto dust, you shall return." Memento mori has been an important part of ascetic disciplines as a means of perfecting the character by cultivating detachment and other virtues, and by turning the attention towards the immortality of the soul and the afterlife.[15] Architecture Unshrouded skeleton on Diana Warburton's tomb (dated 1693) in St John the Baptist Church, Chester The most obvious places to look for memento mori meditations are in funeral art and architecture. Perhaps the most striking to contemporary minds is the transi or cadaver tomb, a tomb that depicts the decayed corpse of the deceased. This became a fashion in the tombs of the wealthy in the fifteenth century, and surviving examples still offer a stark reminder of the vanity of earthly riches. Later, Puritan tomb stones in the colonial United States frequently depicted winged skulls, skeletons, or angels snuffing out candles. These are among the numerous themes associated with skull imagery. Another example of memento mori is provided by the chapels of bones, such as the Capela dos Ossos in Évora or the Capuchin Crypt in Rome. These are chapels where the walls are totally or partially covered by human remains, mostly bones. The entrance to the Capela dos Ossos has the following sentence: "We bones, lying here bare, await yours." Visual art Philippe de Champaigne's Vanitas (c. 1671) is reduced to three essentials: Life, Death, and Time Timepieces have been used to illustrate that the time of the living on Earth grows shorter with each passing minute. Public clocks would be decorated with mottos such as ultima forsan ("perhaps the last" [hour]) or vulnerant omnes, ultima necat ("they all wound, and the last kills"). Clocks have carried the motto tempus fugit, "time flees". Old striking clocks often sported automata who would appear and strike the hour; some of the celebrated automaton clocks from Augsburg, Germany, had Death striking the hour. Private people carried smaller reminders of their own mortality. Mary, Queen of Scots owned a large watch carved in the form of a silver skull, embellished with the lines of Horace, "Pale death knocks with the same tempo upon the huts of the poor and the towers of Kings." In the late 16th and through the 17th century, memento mori jewelry was popular. Items included mourning rings,[16] pendants, lockets, and brooches.[17] These pieces depicted tiny motifs of skulls, bones, and coffins, in addition to messages and names of the departed, picked out in precious metals and enamel.[17][18] During the same period there emerged the artistic genre known as vanitas, Latin for "emptiness" or "vanity". Especially popular in Holland and then spreading to other European nations, vanitas paintings typically represented assemblages of numerous symbolic objects such as human skulls, guttering candles, wilting flowers, soap bubbles, butterflies, and hourglasses. In combination, vanitas assemblies conveyed the impermanence of human endeavours and of the decay that is inevitable with the passage of time. See also the themes associated with the image of the skull. Literature Memento mori is also an important literary theme. Well-known literary meditations on death in English prose include Sir Thomas Browne's Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial and Jeremy Taylor's Holy Living and Holy Dying. These works were part of a Jacobean cult of melancholia that marked the end of the Elizabethan era. In the late eighteenth century, literary elegies were a common genre; Thomas Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard and Edward Young's Night Thoughts are typical members of the genre. In the European devotional literature of the Renaissance, the Ars Moriendi, memento mori had moral value by reminding individuals of their mortality.[19] Music Apart from the genre of requiem and funeral music, there is also a rich tradition of memento mori in the Early Music of Europe. Especially those facing the ever-present death during the recurring bubonic plague pandemics from the 1340s onward tried to toughen themselves by anticipating the inevitable in chants, from the simple Geisslerlieder of the Flagellant movement to the more refined cloistral or courtly songs. The lyrics often looked at life as a necessary and god-given vale of tears with death as a ransom, and they reminded people to lead sinless lives to stand a chance at Judgment Day. The following two Latin stanzas (with their English translations) are typical of memento mori in medieval music; they are from the virelai ad mortem festinamus of the Llibre Vermell de Montserrat from 1399: Vita brevis breviter in brevi finietur, Mors venit velociter quae neminem veretur, Omnia mors perimit et nulli miseretur. Ad mortem festinamus peccare desistamus. Ni conversus fueris et sicut puer factus Et vitam mutaveris in meliores actus, Intrare non poteris regnum Dei beatus. Ad mortem festinamus peccare desistamus.     Life is short, and shortly it will end; Death comes quickly and respects no one, Death destroys everything and takes pity on no one. To death we are hastening, let us refrain from sinning. If you do not turn back and become like a child, And change your life for the better, You will not be able to enter, blessed, the Kingdom of God. To death we are hastening, let us refrain from sinning. Danse macabre The danse macabre is another well-known example of the memento mori theme, with its dancing depiction of the Grim Reaper carrying off rich and poor alike. This and similar depictions of Death decorated many European churches.... The salutation of the Hermits of St. Paul of France Memento mori was the salutation used by the Hermits of St. Paul of France (1620–1633), also known as the Brothers of Death.[20] It is sometimes claimed that the Trappists use this salutation, but this is not true.[21] In Puritan America Thomas Smith's Self-Portrait Colonial American art saw a large number of memento mori images due to Puritan influence. The Puritan community in 17th-century North America looked down upon art because they believed that it drew the faithful away from God and, if away from God, then it could only lead to the devil. However, portraits were considered historical records and, as such, they were allowed. Thomas Smith, a 17th-century Puritan, fought in many naval battles and also painted. In his self-portrait, we see these pursuits represented alongside a typical Puritan memento mori with a skull, suggesting his awareness of imminent death. The poem underneath the skull emphasizes Thomas Smith's acceptance of death and of turning away from the world of the living:     Why why should I the World be minding, Therein a World of Evils Finding. Then Farwell World: Farwell thy jarres, thy Joies thy Toies thy Wiles thy Warrs. Truth Sounds Retreat: I am not sorye. The Eternall Drawes to him my heart, By Faith (which can thy Force Subvert) To Crowne me (after Grace) with Glory. Mexico's Day of the Dead Posada's 1910 La Calavera Catrina Main article: Day of the Dead Much memento mori art is associated with the Mexican festival Day of the Dead, including skull-shaped candies and bread loaves adorned with bread "bones". This theme was also famously expressed in the works of the Mexican engraver José Guadalupe Posada, in which people from various walks of life are depicted as skeletons. Another manifestation of memento mori is found in the Mexican "Calavera", a literary composition in verse form normally written in honour of a person who is still alive, but written as if that person were dead. These compositions have a comedic tone and are often offered from one friend to another during Day of the Dead.[22] Contemporary culture Roman Krznaric suggests Memento Mori is an important topic to bring back into our thoughts and belief system; "Philosophers have come up with lots of what I call 'death tasters' – thought experiments for seizing the day." These thought experiments are powerful to get us re-oriented back to death into current awareness and living with spontaneity. Albert Camus stated "Come to terms with death, thereafter anything is possible." Jean-Paul Sartre expressed that life is given to us early, and is shortened at the end, all the while taken away at every step of the way, emphasizing that the end is only the beginning every day.[23] Similar concepts in other religions and cultures In Buddhism The Buddhist practice maraṇasati meditates on death. The word is a Pāli compound of maraṇa 'death' (an Indo-European cognate of Latin mori) and sati 'awareness', so very close to memento mori. It is first used in early Buddhist texts, the suttapiṭaka of the Pāli Canon, with parallels in the āgamas of the "Northern" Schools. In Japanese Zen and samurai culture In Japan, the influence of Zen Buddhist contemplation of death on indigenous culture can be gauged by the following quotation from the classic treatise on samurai ethics, Hagakure:[24]     The Way of the Samurai is, morning after morning, the practice of death, considering whether it will be here or be there, imagining the most sightly way of dying, and putting one's mind firmly in death. Although this may be a most difficult thing, if one will do it, it can be done. There is nothing that one should suppose cannot be done.[25] In the annual appreciation of cherry blossom and fall colors, hanami and momijigari, it was philosophized that things are most splendid at the moment before their fall, and to aim to live and die in a similar fashion.[citation needed] In Tibetan Buddhism Tibetan Citipati mask depicting Mahākāla. The skull mask of Citipati is a reminder of the impermanence of life and the eternal cycle of life and death. In Tibetan Buddhism, there is a mind training practice known as Lojong. The initial stages of the classic Lojong begin with 'The Four Thoughts that Turn the Mind', or, more literally, 'Four Contemplations to Cause a Revolution in the Mind'.[citation needed] The second of these four is the contemplation on impermanence and death. In particular, one contemplates that;     All compounded things are impermanent.     The human body is a compounded thing.     Therefore, death of the body is certain.     The time of death is uncertain and beyond our control. There are a number of classic verse formulations of these contemplations meant for daily reflection to overcome our strong habitual tendency to live as though we will certainly not die today. Lalitavistara Sutra The following is from the Lalitavistara Sūtra, a major work in the classical Sanskrit canon: अध्रुवं त्रिभवं शरदभ्रनिभं नटरङ्गसमा जगिर् ऊर्मिच्युती। गिरिनद्यसमं लघुशीघ्रजवं व्रजतायु जगे यथ विद्यु नभे॥ ज्वलितं त्रिभवं जरव्याधिदुखैः मरणाग्निप्रदीप्तमनाथमिदम्। भवनि शरणे सद मूढ जगत् भ्रमती भ्रमरो यथ कुम्भगतो॥     The three worlds are fleeting like autumn clouds. Like a staged performance, beings come and go. In tumultuous waves, rushing by, like rapids over a cliff. Like lightning, wanderers in samsara burst into existence, and are gone in a flash. Beings are ablaze with the sufferings of sickness and old age, And with no defence against the conflagration of Death The bewildered, seeking refuge in worldly existence Spin round and round, like bees trapped in a jar.[26] The Udānavarga A very well known verse in the Pali, Sanskrit and Tibetan canons states [this is from the Sanskrit version, the Udānavarga: सर्वे क्षयान्ता निचयाः पतनान्ताः समुच्छ्रयाः | सम्योगा विप्रयोगान्ता मरणान्तं हि जीवितम् |1,22|     All that is acquired will be lost What rises will fall Where there is meeting there will be separation What is born will surely die.[27] Shantideva, Bodhicaryavatara Shantideva, in the Bodhisattvacaryāvatāra 'Bodhisattva's Way of Life' reflects at length: कृताकृतापरीक्षोऽयं मृत्युर्विश्रम्भघातकः। स्वस्थास्वस्थैरविश्वास्य आकमिस्मकमहाशनि:॥ २/३४॥ अप्रिया न भविष्यन्ति प्रियो मे न भविष्यति। अहं च न भविष्यामि सर्वं च न भविष्यति॥ २/३७॥ तत्तत्स्मरणताम याति यद्यद्वस्त्वनुभयते। स्वप्नानुभूतवत्सर्वं गतं न पूनरीक्ष्यते॥ २/३६॥ रात्रिन्दिवमविश्राममायुषो वर्धते व्ययः। आयस्य चागमो नास्ति न मरिष्यामि किं न्वहम्॥ २/४० यमदूतैर्गृहीतस्य कुतो बन्धुः कुतः सुह्रत्। पुण्यमेकं तदा त्राणं मया तच्च न सेवितम्॥ २/४१॥     Death does not differentiate between tasks done and undone. This traitor is not to be trusted by the healthy or the ill, for it is like an unexpected, great thunderbolt. BCA 2.33 My enemies will not remain, nor will my friends remain. I shall not remain. Nothing will remain. BCA 2:35 Whatever is experienced will fade to a memory. Like an experience in a dream, everything that has passed will not be seen again. BCA 2:36 Day and night, a life span unceasingly diminishes, and there is no adding onto it. Shall I not die then? BCA 2:39 For a person seized by the messengers of Death, what good is a relative and what good is a friend? At that time, merit alone is a protection, and I have not applied myself to it. BCA 2:41 In more modern Tibetan Buddhist works In a practice text written by the 19th century Tibetan master Dudjom Lingpa for serious meditators, he formulates the second contemplation in this way:[28][29]     On this occasion when you have such a bounty of opportunities in terms of your body, environment, friends, spiritual mentors, time, and practical instructions, without procrastinating until tomorrow and the next day, arouse a sense of urgency, as if a spark landed on your body or a grain of sand fell in your eye. If you have not swiftly applied yourself to practice, examine the births and deaths of other beings and reflect again and again on the unpredictability of your lifespan and the time of your death, and on the uncertainty of your own situation. Meditate on this until you have definitively integrated it with your mind... The appearances of this life, including your surroundings and friends, are like last night's dream, and this life passes more swiftly than a flash of lightning in the sky. There is no end to this meaningless work. What a joke to prepare to live forever! Wherever you are born in the heights or depths of saṃsāra, the great noose of suffering will hold you tight. Acquiring freedom for yourself is as rare as a star in the daytime, so how is it possible to practice and achieve liberation? The root of all mind training and practical instructions is planted by knowing the nature of existence. There is no other way. I, an old vagabond, have shaken my beggar's satchel, and this is what came out. The contemporary Tibetan master, Yangthang Rinpoche, in his short text 'Summary of the View, Meditation, and Conduct':[30] །ཁྱེད་རྙེད་དཀའ་བ་མི་ཡི་ལུས་རྟེན་རྙེད། །སྐྱེ་དཀའ་བའི་ངེས་འབྱུང་གི་བསམ་པ་སྐྱེས། །མཇལ་དཀའ་བའི་མཚན་ལྡན་གྱི་བླ་མ་མཇལ། །འཕྲད་དཀའ་བ་དམ་པའི་ཆོས་དང་འཕྲད། འདི་འདྲ་བའི་ལུས་རྟེན་བཟང་པོ་འདི། །ཐོབ་དཀའ་བའི་ཚུལ་ལ་ཡང་ཡང་སོམ། རྙེད་པ་འདི་དོན་ཡོད་མ་བྱས་ན། །འདི་མི་རྟག་རླུང་གསེབ་མར་མེ་འདྲ། ཡུན་རིང་པོའི་བློ་གཏད་འདི་ལ་མེད། །ཤི་བར་དོར་གྲོལ་བའི་གདེངས་མེད་ན། །ཚེ་ཕྱི་མའི་སྡུག་བསྔལ་ཨ་རེ་འཇིགས། །མཐའ་མེད་པའི་འཁོར་བར་འཁྱམས་དགོས་ཚེ། །འདིའི་རང་བཞིན་བསམ་ན་སེམས་རེ་སྐྱོ། །ཚེ་འདི་ལ་བློ་གདེངས་ཐོབ་པ་ཞིག །ཅི་ནས་ཀྱང་མཛད་རྒྱུ་བཀའ་དྲིན་ཆེ། །འདི་བདག་གིས་ཁྱོད་ལ་རེ་བ་ཡིན།     You have obtained a human life, which is difficult to find, Have aroused an intention of a spirit of emergence, which is difficult to arouse, Have met a qualified guru, who is difficult to meet, And you have encountered the sublime Dharma, which is difficult to encounter. Reflect again and again on the difficulty Of obtaining such a fine human life. If you do not make this meaningful, It will be like a butter lamp in the wind of impermanence. Do not count on this lasting a long time. The Tibetan Canon also includes copious materials on the meditative preparation for the death process and intermediate period bardo between death and rebirth. Amongst them are the famous "Tibetan Book of the Dead", in Tibetan Bardo Thodol, the "Natural Liberation through Hearing in the Bardo". In Islam The "remembrance of death" (Arabic: تذكرة الموت, Tadhkirat al-Mawt; deriving from تذكرة, tadhkirah, Arabic for memorandum or admonition), has been a major topic of Islamic spirituality since the time of the Islamic prophet Muhammad in Medina. It is grounded in the Qur'an, where there are recurring injunctions to pay heed to the fate of previous generations.[31] The hadith literature, which preserves the teachings of Muhammad, records advice for believers to "remember often death, the destroyer of pleasures."[32] Some Sufis have been called "ahl al-qubur," the "people of the graves," because of their practice of frequenting graveyards to ponder on mortality and the vanity of life, based on the teaching of Muhammad to visit graves.[33] Al-Ghazali devotes to this topic the last book of his "The Revival of the Religious Sciences".[34] Iceland The Hávamál ("Sayings of the High One"), a 13th century Icelandic compilation poetically attributed to the god Odin, includes two sections – the Gestaþáttr and the Loddfáfnismál – offering many gnomic proverbs expressing the memento mori philosophy, most famously Gestaþáttr number 77: Deyr fé, deyja frændur, deyr sjálfur ið sama; ek veit einn at aldri deyr, dómr um dauðan hvern.     Animals die, friends die, and thyself, too, shall die; but one thing I know that never dies the tales of the one who died." (wikipedia.orG) "A vanitas is a symbolic work of art showing the transience of life, the futility of pleasure, and the certainty of death, often contrasting symbols of wealth and symbols of ephemerality and death. Best-known are vanitas still lifes, a common genre in Low Countries of the 16th and 17th centuries; they have also been created at other times and in other media and genres.... Etymology The Latin noun vanitas (from the Latin adjective vanus 'empty') means 'emptiness', 'futility', or 'worthlessness', the traditional Christian view being that earthly goods and pursuits are transient and worthless.[2] It alludes to Ecclesiastes 1:2; 12:8, where vanitas translates the Hebrew word hevel, which also includes the concept of transitoriness.[3][4][5] Themes Pierfrancesco Cittadini, 17th century Italian school Vanitas themes were common in medieval funerary art, with most surviving examples in sculpture. By the 15th century, these could be extremely morbid and explicit, reflecting an increased obsession with death and decay also seen in the Ars moriendi, the Danse Macabre, and the overlapping motif of the Memento mori. From the Renaissance such motifs gradually became more indirect and, as the still-life genre became popular, found a home there. Paintings executed in the vanitas style were meant to remind viewers of the transience of life, the futility of pleasure, and the certainty of death. They also provided a moral justification for painting attractive objects. Motifs Vanitas by Harmen Steenwijck Common vanitas symbols include skulls, which are a reminder of the certainty of death; rotten fruit (decay); bubbles (the brevity of life and suddenness of death); smoke, watches, and hourglasses (the brevity of life); and musical instruments (brevity and the ephemeral nature of life). Fruit, flowers and butterflies can be interpreted in the same way, and a peeled lemon was, like life, attractive to look at but bitter to taste. Art historians debate how much, and how seriously, the vanitas theme is implied in still-life paintings without explicit imagery such as a skull. As in much moralistic genre painting, the enjoyment evoked by the sensuous depiction of the subject is in a certain conflict with the moralistic message.[6] Composition of flowers is a less obvious style of vanitas by Abraham Mignon in the National Museum, Warsaw. Barely visible amid vivid and perilous nature (snakes, poisonous mushrooms), a bird skeleton is a symbol of vanity and shortness of life. Vanitas by Jan Sanders van Hemessen Outside visual art     The first movement in composer Robert Schumann's 5 Pieces in a Folk Style, for Cello and Piano, Op. 102 is entitled Vanitas vanitatum: Mit Humor.     Vanitas vanitatum is the title of an oratorio written by an Italian Baroque composer Giacomo Carissimi (1604/1605 -1674).     Composer Richard Barrett's Vanity, for orchestra, is greatly inspired by this movement.     Vanitas is the seventh album by British Extreme Metal band Anaal Nathrakh.     Vanitas is the name of a character from the Kingdom Hearts franchise.     Vanitas is the name of one of the two main characters from Vanitas no Carte In modern times     Jana Sterbak, Vanitas: Flesh Dress for an Albino Anorectic, artwork, 1987.     Alexander de Cadenet, Skull Portraits, various subjects, 1996 – present.     Philippe Pasqua, series of skulls, sculpture, 1990s – present.     Damien Hirst, For the Love of God, sculpture (A diamond skull), 2007.     Anne de Carbuccia, One Planet One Future, various subjects, 2013 – present." (wikipedia.orG) "A spider web, spiderweb, spider's web, or cobweb (from the archaic word coppe, meaning "spider")[1] is a structure created by a spider out of proteinaceous spider silk extruded from its spinnerets, generally meant to catch its prey. Spider webs have existed for at least 100 million years, as witnessed in a rare find of Early Cretaceous amber from Sussex, in southern England.[2] Many spiders build webs specifically to trap and catch insects to eat. However, not all spiders catch their prey in webs, and some do not build webs at all. "Spider web" is typically used to refer to a web that is apparently still in use (i.e. clean), whereas "cobweb" refers to abandoned (i.e. dusty) webs.[3] However, the word "cobweb" is also used by biologists to describe the tangled three-dimensional web[4] of some spiders of the family Theridiidae. While this large family is known as the cobweb spiders, they actually have a huge range of web architectures; other names for this spider family include tangle-web spiders and comb-footed spiders. ... Silk production See also: Spider silk Clearly visible spider silk production Spider web covered in hoar frost When spiders moved from the water to the land in the Early Devonian period, they started making silk to protect their bodies and their eggs.[3][5] Spiders gradually started using silk for hunting purposes, first as guide lines and signal lines, then as ground or bush webs, and eventually as the aerial webs that are familiar today.[6] Spiders produce silk from their spinneret glands located at the tip of their abdomen. Each gland produces a thread for a special purpose – for example a trailed safety line, sticky silk for trapping prey or fine silk for wrapping it. Spiders use different gland types to produce different silks, and some spiders are capable of producing up to eight different silks during their lifetime.[7] Most spiders have three pairs of spinnerets, each having its own function – there are also spiders with just one pair and others with as many as four pairs. Webs allow a spider to catch prey without having to expend energy by running it down, making it an efficient method of gathering food. However these energy savings are somewhat offset by the fact that constructing the web is in itself energetically costly, due to the large amount of protein required in the form of silk. In addition, after a time the silk will lose its stickiness and thus become inefficient at capturing prey. It is common for spiders to eat their own web daily to recoup some of the energy used in spinning. Through ingestion and digestion, the silk proteins are thus recycled. Types Argiope sp. sitting on web decorations at the center of the web There are a few types of spider webs found in the wild, and many spiders are classified by the webs they weave. Different types of spider webs include:     Spiral orb webs, associated primarily with the family Araneidae, as well as Tetragnathidae and Uloboridae[8]     Tangle webs or cobwebs, associated with the family Theridiidae     Funnel webs, with associations divided into primitive and modern     Tubular webs, which run up the bases of trees or along the ground     Sheet webs Several different types of silk may be used in web construction, including a "sticky" capture silk and "fluffy" capture silk, depending on the type of spider. Webs may be in a vertical plane (most orb webs), a horizontal plane (sheet webs), or at any angle in between. It is hypothesized that these types of aerial webs co-evolved with the evolution of winged insects. As insects are spiders' main prey, it is likely that they would impose strong selectional forces on the foraging behavior of spiders.[3][9] Most commonly found in the sheet-web spider families, some webs will have loose, irregular tangles of silk above them. These tangled obstacle courses serve to disorient and knock down flying insects, making them more vulnerable to being trapped on the web below. They may also help to protect the spider from predators such as birds and wasps.[10] It is reported that several Nephila pilipes individuals can collectively construct an aggregated web system to counter bird predation from all directions.[11] Larinioides cornutus builds its web. Orb web construction     This section does not cite any sources. Please help improve this section by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (January 2011) (Learn how and when to remove this template message) Most orb weavers construct webs in a vertical plane, although there are exceptions, such as Uloborus diversus, which builds a horizontal web.[12] During the process of making an orb web, the spider will use its own body for measurements. There is variation in web construction among orb-weaving spiders, in particular, the species Zygiella x-notata is known for its characteristic missing sector web crossed by a single signal thread.[13] Many webs span gaps between objects which the spider could not cross by crawling. This is done by first producing a fine adhesive thread to drift on a faint breeze across a gap. When it sticks to a surface at the far end, the spider feels the change in the vibration. The spider reels in and tightens the first strand, then carefully walks along it and strengthens it with a second thread. This process is repeated until the thread is strong enough to support the rest of the web. After strengthening the first thread, the spider continues to make a Y-shaped netting. The first three radials of the web are now constructed. More radials are added, making sure that the distance between each radial and the next is small enough to cross. This means that the number of radials in a web directly depends on the size of the spider plus the size of the web. It is common for a web to be about 20 times the size of the spider building it. After the radials are complete, the spider fortifies the center of the web with about five circular threads. It makes a spiral of non-sticky, widely spaced threads to enable it to move easily around its own web during construction, working from the inside outward. Then, beginning from the outside and moving inward, the spider methodically replaces this spiral with a more closely spaced one made of adhesive threads. It uses the initial radiating lines as well as the non-sticky spirals as guide lines. The spaces between each spiral and the next are directly proportional to the distance from the tip of its back legs to its spinners. This is one way the spider uses its own body as a measuring/spacing device. While the sticky spirals are formed, the non-adhesive spirals are removed as there is no need for them any more. After the spider has completed its web, it chews off the initial three center spiral threads then sits and waits. If the web is broken without any structural damage during the construction, the spider does not make any initial attempts to rectify the problem. The spider, after spinning its web, then waits on or near the web for a prey animal to become trapped. The spider senses the impact and struggle of a prey animal by vibrations transmitted through the web. A spider positioned in the middle of the web makes for a highly visible prey for birds and other predators, even without web decorations; many day-hunting orb-web spinners reduce this risk by hiding at the edge of the web with one foot on a signal line from the hub or by appearing to be inedible or unappetizing. Spiders do not usually adhere to their own webs, because they are able to spin both sticky and non-sticky types of silk, and are careful to travel across only non-sticky portions of the web. However, they are not immune to their own glue. Some of the strands of the web are sticky, and others are not. For example, if a spider has chosen to wait along the outer edges of its web, it may spin a non-sticky prey or signal line to the web hub to monitor web movement. However, in the course of spinning sticky strands, spiders have to touch these sticky strands. They do this without sticking by using careful movements, dense hairs and nonstick coatings on their feet to prevent adhesion.[14]     Zygiella orb web     Infographic illustrating the process of constructing an orb web     A typical orb web constructed by an Araneus (family Araneidae) spider     Australian garden orb weaver spider, after having captured prey Uses A soldier ant finds itself entangled in the web of a garden spider. Some species of spider do not use webs for capturing prey directly, instead pouncing from concealment (e.g. trapdoor spiders) or running them down in open chase (e.g. wolf spiders). The net-casting spider balances the two methods of running and web spinning in its feeding habits. This spider weaves a small net which it attaches to its front legs. It then lurks in wait for potential prey and, when such prey arrives, lunges forward to wrap its victim in the net, bite and paralyze it. Hence, this spider expends less energy catching prey than a primitive hunter such as the wolf spider. It also avoids the energy loss of weaving a large orb web. Some spiders spin threads of silk to catch the wind and then sail on the wind to a new location. Some spiders manage to use the signaling-snare technique of a web without spinning a web at all. Several types of water-dwelling spiders rest their feet on the water's surface in much the same manner as an orb-web user. When an insect falls onto the water and is ensnared by surface tension, the spider can detect the vibrations and run out to capture the prey. Human use Cobweb paintings, which began during the 16th century in a remote valley of the Austrian Tyrolean Alps, were created on fabrics consisting of layered and wound cobwebs, stretched over cardboard to make a mat, and strengthened by brushing with milk diluted in water. A small brush was then used to apply watercolor to the cobwebs, or custom tools to create engravings. Fewer than a hundred cobweb paintings survive today, most of which are held in private collections.[15] In traditional European medicine, cobwebs were used on wounds and cuts and seem to help healing and reduce bleeding.[16] Spider webs are rich in vitamin K, which can be effective in clotting blood. Webs were used several hundred years ago as pads to stop an injured person's bleeding.[17] The effects of some drugs can be measured by examining their effects on a spider's web-building.[18] In northeastern Nigeria, cow horn resonators in traditional xylophones often have holes covered with spider webs to create a buzzing sound.[19] Spider web strands have been used for crosshairs or reticles in telescopes.[20] Development of technologies to mass-produce spider silk has led to manufacturing of prototype military protection, medical devices, and consumer goods.[21] Physical and chemical properties The figure on the left is an optical microscope image of glue balls. The second figure from left is a scanning ion secondary electron image of the glue balls. The two figures on the right are the scanning ion secondary electron images before and after adhesion of the substrate to the glue ball.[22] The stickiness of spiders' webs is due to droplets of glue suspended on the silk threads. These glue balls are multifunctional – that is, their behavior depends on how quickly something touching a glue ball attempts to withdraw. At high velocities, they function as an elastic solid, resembling rubber; at lower velocities, they simply act as a sticky glue. This allows them to retain a grip on attached food particles.[23] The web is electrically conductive which causes the silk threads to spring out to trap their quarry, as flying insects tend to gain a static charge which attracts the silk.[24] Neurotoxins have been detected in the glue balls of some spider webs. Presumably these toxins help immobilize prey, but their function could also be antimicrobial, or protection from ants or other animals that steal from the webs or might attack the spider.[25] The tensile strength of spider silk is greater than the same weight of steel and has much greater elasticity. Its microstructure is under investigation for potential applications in industry, including bullet-proof vests and artificial tendons. Researchers have used genetically modified mammals to produce the proteins needed to make this material.[26][27][28] After severe, extensive flooding in Sindh, Pakistan, many trees were covered with spider webs. The communal spider web at Lake Tawakoni State Park Communal spider webs Occasionally, a group of spiders may build webs together in the same area. Massive flooding in Pakistan during the 2010 monsoon drove spiders above the waterline, into trees. The result was trees covered with spider webs.[29] One such web, reported in 2007 at Lake Tawakoni State Park in Texas, measured 200 yards (180 m) across. Entomologists believe it may be the result of social cobweb spiders or of spiders building webs to spread out from one another. There is no consensus on how common this occurrence is.[30] In Brazil, there have been two instances of a phenomenon that became known as "raining spiders"; communal webs that cover such wide gaps and which strings are so difficult to see that hundreds of spiders seem to be floating in the air. The first occurred in Santo Antônio da Platina, Paraná, in 2013, and involved Anelosimus eximius individuals;[31] the second was registered in Espírito Santo do Dourado, Minas Gerais, in January 2019, and involved Parawixia bistriata individuals.[32] Low gravity It has been observed that being in Earth's orbit has an effect on the structure of spider webs in space.[33] Spider webs were spun in low Earth orbit in 1973 aboard Skylab, involving two female European garden spiders (cross spiders) called Arabella and Anita, as part of an experiment on the Skylab 3 mission.[34] The aim of the experiment was to test whether the two spiders would spin webs in space, and, if so, whether these webs would be the same as those that spiders produced on Earth. The experiment was a student project of Judy Miles of Lexington, Massachusetts.[34] After the launch on July 28, 1973, and entering Skylab, the spiders were released by astronaut Owen Garriott into a box that resembled a window frame.[34] The spiders proceeded to construct their web while a camera took photographs and examined the spiders' behavior in a zero-gravity environment. Both spiders took a long time to adapt to their weightless existence. However, after a day, Arabella spun the first web in the experimental cage, although it was initially incomplete. The first web spun by the spider Arabella in orbit The web was completed the following day. The crew members were prompted to expand the initial protocol. They fed and watered the spiders, giving them a house fly.[35] The first web was removed on August 13 to allow the spider to construct a second web. At first, the spider failed to construct a new web. When given more water, it built a second web. This time, it was more elaborate than the first. Both spiders died during the mission, possibly from dehydration.[34] When scientists were given the opportunity to study the webs, they discovered that the space webs were finer than normal Earth webs, and although the patterns of the web were not totally dissimilar, variations were spotted, and there was a definite difference in the characteristics of the web. Additionally, while the webs were finer overall, the space web had variations in thickness in places: some places were slightly thinner, and others slightly thicker. This was unusual, because Earth webs have been observed to have uniform thickness.[36] Later experiments indicated that having access to a light source could orient the spiders and enable them to build their normal asymmetric webs when gravity was not a factor.[37][38] In popular culture Spider webs play a crucial role in the 1952 children's novel Charlotte's Web. Webs are also featured in many other cultural depictions of spiders. In films, illustration, and other visual arts, spider webs may be used to readily suggest a "spooky" atmosphere, or imply neglect or the passage of time. Artificial "spider webs" are a common element of Halloween decorations. Spider webs are a common image in tattoo art, often symbolizing long periods of time spent in prison, or used simply to fill gaps between other images. Some observers believe that a small spider is depicted on the United States one-dollar bill, in the upper-right corner of the front side (obverse), perched on the shield surrounding the number "1". This perception is enhanced by the resemblance of the background image of intertwining fine lines to a stylized spider web. However, other observers believe the figure is an owl.[39] The World Wide Web is thus named because of its tangled and interlaced structure, said to resemble that of a spider web. Artificial spider webs are used by the superhero Spider-Man to restrain enemies and to make ropes on which to swing between buildings as quick transportation. Some incarnations of the character, such as the version in the Sam Raimi film trilogy and Spider-Man 2099, are shown to be able to produce organic webs. The notable tensile strength of spider webs is often exaggerated in science fiction, often as a plot device to justify the presence of artificially giant spiders.[citation needed] Posters were used by the women at Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp, and often featured the symbol of a spider web, meant to symbolise the fragility and perseverance of the Greenham women." (wikipedia.org) "In works of art, the adjective macabre (US: /məˈkɑːb/ or UK: /məˈkɑːbrə/; French: [makabʁ]) means "having the quality of having a grim or ghastly atmosphere". The macabre works to emphasize the details and symbols of death. The term also refers to works particularly gruesome in nature.... History The quality is not often found in ancient Greek and Latin writers[citation needed], though there are traces of it in Apuleius and the author of the Satyricon. Outstanding instances in English literature include the works of John Webster, Robert Louis Stevenson, Mervyn Peake, Charles Dickens, Roald Dahl, Thomas Hardy and Cyril Tourneur.[1] In American literature, authors whose work feature this quality include Edgar Allan Poe, H. P. Lovecraft, and Stephen King. The word has gained its significance from its use in French as la danse macabre for the allegorical representation of the ever-present and universal power of death, known in English as the Dance of Death and in German as Totentanz. The typical form which the allegory takes is that of a series of images in which Death appears, either as a dancing skeleton or as a shrunken shrouded corpse, to people representing every age and condition of life, and leads them all in a dance to the grave. Of the numerous examples painted or sculptured on the walls of cloisters or church yards through medieval Europe, few remain except in woodcuts and engravings.     The series at Basel originally at the Klingenthal, a nunnery in Little Basel, dated from the beginning of the 14th century. In the middle of the 15th century this was moved to the churchyard of the Predigerkloster at Basel, and was restored, probably by Hans Kluber, in 1568. The collapse of the wall in 1805 reduced it to fragments, and only drawings of it remain.     A Dance of Death in its simplest form still survives in the Marienkirche at Lübeck as 15th-century painting on the walls of a chapel. Here there are 24 figures in couples, between each is a dancing Death linking the groups by outstretched hands, the whole ring being led by a Death playing on a pipe.     In Tallinn (Reval), Estonia there is a well-known Danse Macabre painting by Bernt Notke displayed at St. Nikolaus Church (Niguliste), dating the end of 15th century.     At Dresden there is a sculptured life-size series in the old Neustädter Kirchhoff, moved here from the palace of Duke George in 1701 after a fire.     At Rouen in the cloister of St Maclou there also remains a sculptured danse macabre.     There was a celebrated fresco of the subject in the cloister of Old St Pauls in London.     There was another in the now destroyed Hungerford Chapel at Salisbury, of which only a single woodcut, "Death and the Gallant", remains.     Of the many engraved reproductions of the Old St Pauls fresco, the most famous is the series drawn by Holbein. The theme continued to inspire artists and musicians long after the medieval period, Schubert's string quartet Death and the Maiden (1824) being one example, and Camille Saint-Saëns' tone poem Danse macabre, op. 40 (1847). In the 20th century, Ingmar Bergman's 1957 film The Seventh Seal has a personified Death, and could thus count as macabre. The origin of this allegory in painting and sculpture is disputed. It occurs as early as the 14th century, and has often been attributed to the overpowering consciousness of the presence of death due to the Black Death and the miseries of the Hundred Years' War. It has also been attributed to a form of the Morality, a dramatic dialogue between Death and his victims in every station of life, ending in a dance off the stage.[2] The origin of the peculiar form the allegory has taken has also been found in the dancing skeletons on late Roman sarcophagi and mural paintings at Cumae or Pompeii, and a false connection has been traced with "The Triumph of Death", attributed to Orcagna, in the Campo Santo at Pisa. Etymology The etymology of the word "macabre" is uncertain. According to Gaston Paris[3] it first occurs in the form "macabre" in Jean le Fèvre's Respit de la mort (1376), Je fis de Macabré la danse, and he takes this accented form to be the true one, and traces it in the name of the first painter of the subject. The more usual explanation is based on the Latin name, Machabaeorum chorea (Dance of Maccabees). The seven tortured brothers, with their mother and Eleazar (2 Maccabees 6 and 7) were prominent figures on this hypothesis in the supposed dramatic dialogues.[4] Other connections have been suggested, as for example with St. Macarius, or Macaire, the hermit, who, according to Vasari, is to be identified with the figure pointing to the decaying corpses in the Pisan Triumph of Death, or with an Arabic word maqābir (مقابر), cemeteries (plural of maqbara." (wikipedia.org) "A vampire is a creature from folklore that subsists by feeding on the vital essence (generally in the form of blood) of the living. In European folklore, vampires are undead creatures that often visited loved ones and caused mischief or deaths in the neighbourhoods they inhabited while they were alive. They wore shrouds and were often described as bloated and of ruddy or dark countenance, markedly different from today's gaunt, pale vampire which dates from the early 19th century. Vampiric entities have been recorded in cultures around the world; the term vampire was popularized in Western Europe after reports of an 18th-century mass hysteria of a pre-existing folk belief in the Balkans and Eastern Europe that in some cases resulted in corpses being staked and people being accused of vampirism.[1] Local variants in Eastern Europe were also known by different names, such as shtriga in Albania, vrykolakas in Greece and strigoi in Romania. In modern times, the vampire is generally held to be a fictitious entity, although belief in similar vampiric creatures such as the chupacabra still persists in some cultures. Early folk belief in vampires has sometimes been ascribed to the ignorance of the body's process of decomposition after death and how people in pre-industrial societies tried to rationalize this, creating the figure of the vampire to explain the mysteries of death. Porphyria was linked with legends of vampirism in 1985 and received much media exposure, but has since been largely discredited.[2][3] The charismatic and sophisticated vampire of modern fiction was born in 1819 with the publication of "The Vampyre" by the English writer John Polidori; the story was highly successful and arguably the most influential vampire work of the early 19th century.[1] Bram Stoker's 1897 novel Dracula is remembered as the quintessential vampire novel and provided the basis of the modern vampire legend, even though it was published after fellow Irish author Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu's 1872 novel Carmilla. The success of this book spawned a distinctive vampire genre, still popular in the 21st century, with books, films, television shows, and video games. The vampire has since become a dominant figure in the horror genre. ... Etymology The word vampire (as vampyre) first appeared in English in 1732, in news reports about vampire "epidemics" in eastern Europe.[4] Vampires had already been discussed in French[5] and German literature.[6] After Austria gained control of northern Serbia and Oltenia with the Treaty of Passarowitz in 1718, officials noted the local practice of exhuming bodies and "killing vampires".[6] These reports, prepared between 1725 and 1732, received widespread publicity.[6] The English term was derived (possibly via French vampyre) from the German Vampir, in turn derived in the early 18th century from the Serbian vampir (Serbian Cyrillic: вампир).[7][8][9][10] The Serbian form has parallels in virtually all Slavic languages: Bulgarian and Macedonian вампир (vampir), Bosnian: vampir/вампир, Croatian vampir, Czech and Slovak upír, Polish wąpierz, and (perhaps East Slavic-influenced) upiór, Ukrainian упир (upyr), Russian упырь (upyr'), Belarusian упыр (upyr), from Old East Slavic упирь (upir') (many of these languages have also borrowed forms such as "vampir/wampir" subsequently from the West; these are distinct from the original local words for the creature). The exact etymology is unclear.[11] Among the proposed Proto-Slavic forms are *ǫpyrь and *ǫpirь.[12] In Albanian the words lu(v)gat and dhampir are used; the latter is perhaps a loanword from the Slavic languages, though it superficially seems to derive from the Gheg words dhamb 'tooth' and pir 'to drink'.[13] Another less widespread theory is that the Slavic languages have borrowed the word from a Turkic term for "witch" (e.g., Tatar ubyr, although the first folk legends about it were recorded only at the end of the 18th century).[12][14] Czech linguist Václav Machek proposes Slovak verb vrepiť sa (stick to, thrust into), or its hypothetical anagram vperiť sa (in Czech, the archaic verb vpeřit means "to thrust violently") as an etymological background, and thus translates upír as "someone who thrusts, bites".[15] An early use of the Old Russian word is in the anti-pagan treatise "Word of Saint Grigoriy" (Russian Слово святого Григория), dated variously to the 11th–13th centuries, where pagan worship of upyri is reported.[16][17] Folk beliefs See also: List of vampiric creatures in folklore The notion of vampirism has existed for millennia. Cultures such as the Mesopotamians, Hebrews, Ancient Greeks, Manipuri and Romans had tales of demons and spirits which are considered precursors to modern vampires. Despite the occurrence of vampiric creatures in these ancient civilizations, the folklore for the entity known today as the vampire originates almost exclusively from early 18th-century southeastern Europe,[1] when verbal traditions of many ethnic groups of the region were recorded and published. In most cases, vampires are revenants of evil beings, suicide victims, or witches, but they can also be created by a malevolent spirit possessing a corpse or by being bitten by a vampire. Belief in such legends became so pervasive that in some areas it caused mass hysteria and even public executions of people believed to be vampires.[18] Description and common attributes Vampire (1895) by Edvard Munch It is difficult to make a single, definitive description of the folkloric vampire, though there are several elements common to many European legends. Vampires were usually reported as bloated in appearance, and ruddy, purplish, or dark in colour; these characteristics were often attributed to the recent drinking of blood. Blood was often seen seeping from the mouth and nose when one was seen in its shroud or coffin and its left eye was often open.[19] It would be clad in the linen shroud it was buried in, and its teeth, hair, and nails may have grown somewhat, though in general fangs were not a feature.[20] Although vampires were generally described as undead, some folk tales spoke of them as living beings.[21][22] Creating vampires Illustration of a vampire from Max Ernst's Une Semaine de Bonté (1934) The causes of vampiric generation were many and varied in original folklore. In Slavic and Chinese traditions, any corpse that was jumped over by an animal, particularly a dog or a cat, was feared to become one of the undead.[23] A body with a wound that had not been treated with boiling water was also at risk. In Russian folklore, vampires were said to have once been witches or people who had rebelled against the Russian Orthodox Church while they were alive.[24] In Albanian folklore, the dhampir is the hybrid child of the karkanxholl (a lycanthropic creature with an iron mail shirt) or the lugat (a water-dwelling ghost or monster). The dhampir sprung of a karkanxholl has the unique ability to discern the karkanxholl; from this derives the expression the dhampir knows the lugat. The lugat cannot be seen, he can only be killed by the dhampir, who himself is usually the son of a lugat. In different regions, animals can be revenants as lugats; also, living people during their sleep. Dhampiraj is also an Albanian surname.[25] In modern fiction In modern works of fiction portraying vampires, when an existing vampire bites, or sires a human, he converts them into a new vampire, and bestows eternal life on them. The sire must choose spare their life, by not draining their blood, otherwise he would "drink" them to death. This form of new vampire creation has been portrayed in Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire, the 2000s TV series Angel, the 2012 Neil Jordan film Byzantium, and the 2013 Jim Jarmusch film Only Lovers Left Alive. Prevention Cultural practices often arose that were intended to prevent a recently deceased loved one from turning into an undead revenant. Burying a corpse upside-down was widespread, as was placing earthly objects, such as scythes or sickles,[26] near the grave to satisfy any demons entering the body or to appease the dead so that it would not wish to arise from its coffin. This method resembles the ancient Greek practice of placing an obolus in the corpse's mouth to pay the toll to cross the River Styx in the underworld. It has been argued that instead, the coin was intended to ward off any evil spirits from entering the body, and this may have influenced later vampire folklore. This tradition persisted in modern Greek folklore about the vrykolakas, in which a wax cross and piece of pottery with the inscription "Jesus Christ conquers" were placed on the corpse to prevent the body from becoming a vampire.[27] Other methods commonly practised in Europe included severing the tendons at the knees or placing poppy seeds, millet, or sand on the ground at the grave site of a presumed vampire; this was intended to keep the vampire occupied all night by counting the fallen grains,[28][29] indicating an association of vampires with arithmomania. Similar Chinese narratives state that if a vampiric being came across a sack of rice, it would have to count every grain; this is a theme encountered in myths from the Indian subcontinent, as well as in South American tales of witches and other sorts of evil or mischievous spirits or beings.[30] Identifying vampires Many rituals were used to identify a vampire. One method of finding a vampire's grave involved leading a virgin boy through a graveyard or church grounds on a virgin stallion—the horse would supposedly balk at the grave in question.[24] Generally a black horse was required, though in Albania it should be white.[31] Holes appearing in the earth over a grave were taken as a sign of vampirism.[32] Corpses thought to be vampires were generally described as having a healthier appearance than expected, plump and showing little or no signs of decomposition.[33] In some cases, when suspected graves were opened, villagers even described the corpse as having fresh blood from a victim all over its face.[34] Evidence that a vampire was active in a given locality included death of cattle, sheep, relatives or neighbours. Folkloric vampires could also make their presence felt by engaging in minor poltergeist-styled activity, such as hurling stones on roofs or moving household objects,[35] and pressing on people in their sleep.[36] Protection Garlic, Bibles, crucifixes, rosaries, holy water, and mirrors have all been seen in various folkloric traditions as means of warding against or identifying vampires.[37][38] Apotropaics—items able to ward off revenants—are common in vampire folklore. Garlic is a common example,[37] a branch of wild rose and hawthorn are said to harm vampires, and in Europe, sprinkling mustard seeds on the roof of a house was said to keep them away.[39] Other apotropaics include sacred items, for example a crucifix, rosary, or holy water. Vampires are said to be unable to walk on consecrated ground, such as that of churches or temples, or cross running water.[38] Although not traditionally regarded as an apotropaic, mirrors have been used to ward off vampires when placed, facing outwards, on a door (in some cultures, vampires do not have a reflection and sometimes do not cast a shadow, perhaps as a manifestation of the vampire's lack of a soul).[40] This attribute is not universal (the Greek vrykolakas/tympanios was capable of both reflection and shadow), but was used by Bram Stoker in Dracula and has remained popular with subsequent authors and filmmakers.[41] Some traditions also hold that a vampire cannot enter a house unless invited by the owner; after the first invitation they can come and go as they please.[40] Though folkloric vampires were believed to be more active at night, they were not generally considered vulnerable to sunlight.[41] Methods of destruction The ninth-century Nørre Nærå Runestone from the Danish island of Fyn is inscribed with a "grave binding inscription" used to keep the deceased in its grave.[42] Methods of destroying suspected vampires varied, with staking the most commonly cited method, particularly in South Slavic cultures.[43] Ash was the preferred wood in Russia and the Baltic states,[44] or hawthorn in Serbia,[45] with a record of oak in Silesia.[46][47] Aspen was also used for stakes, as it was believed that Christ's cross was made from aspen (aspen branches on the graves of purported vampires were also believed to prevent their risings at night).[48] Potential vampires were most often staked through the heart, though the mouth was targeted in Russia and northern Germany[49][50] and the stomach in north-eastern Serbia.[51] Piercing the skin of the chest was a way of "deflating" the bloated vampire. This is similar to a practice of "anti-vampire burial": burying sharp objects, such as sickles, with the corpse, so that they may penetrate the skin if the body bloats sufficiently while transforming into a revenant.[52] Decapitation was the preferred method in German and western Slavic areas, with the head buried between the feet, behind the buttocks or away from the body.[43] This act was seen as a way of hastening the departure of the soul, which in some cultures was said to linger in the corpse. The vampire's head, body, or clothes could also be spiked and pinned to the earth to prevent rising.[53] 800-year-old skeleton found in Bulgaria stabbed through the chest with an iron rod.[54] Romani people drove steel or iron needles into a corpse's heart and placed bits of steel in the mouth, over the eyes, ears and between the fingers at the time of burial. They also placed hawthorn in the corpse's sock or drove a hawthorn stake through the legs. In a 16th-century burial near Venice, a brick forced into the mouth of a female corpse has been interpreted as a vampire-slaying ritual by the archaeologists who discovered it in 2006.[55] In Bulgaria, over 100 skeletons with metal objects, such as plough bits, embedded in the torso have been discovered.[54] Further measures included pouring boiling water over the grave or complete incineration of the body. In the Balkans, a vampire could also be killed by being shot or drowned, by repeating the funeral service, by sprinkling holy water on the body, or by exorcism. In Romania, garlic could be placed in the mouth, and as recently as the 19th century, the precaution of shooting a bullet through the coffin was taken. For resistant cases, the body was dismembered and the pieces burned, mixed with water, and administered to family members as a cure. In Saxon regions of Germany, a lemon was placed in the mouth of suspected vampires.[56] Ancient beliefs Lilith (1892), by John Collier. Atkinson Art Gallery and Library, Southport, England. Tales of supernatural beings consuming the blood or flesh of the living have been found in nearly every culture around the world for many centuries.[57] The term vampire did not exist in ancient times. Blood drinking and similar activities were attributed to demons or spirits who would eat flesh and drink blood; even the devil was considered synonymous with the vampire.[58] Almost every culture associates blood drinking with some kind of revenant or demon, or in some cases a deity. In India tales of vetālas, ghoulish beings that inhabit corpses, have been compiled in the Baitāl Pacīsī; a prominent story in the Kathāsaritsāgara tells of King Vikramāditya and his nightly quests to capture an elusive one.[59] Piśāca, the returned spirits of evil-doers or those who died insane, also bear vampiric attributes.[60] The Persians were one of the first civilizations to have tales of blood-drinking demons: creatures attempting to drink blood from men were depicted on excavated pottery shards.[61] Ancient Babylonia and Assyria had tales of the mythical Lilitu,[62] synonymous with and giving rise to Lilith (Hebrew לילית) and her daughters the Lilu from Hebrew demonology. Lilitu was considered a demon and was often depicted as subsisting on the blood of babies,[62] and estries, female shapeshifting, blood-drinking demons, were said to roam the night among the population, seeking victims. According to Sefer Hasidim, estries were creatures created in the twilight hours before God rested. An injured estrie could be healed by eating bread and salt given to her by her attacker.[63] Greco-Roman mythology described the Empusae,[64] the Lamia,[65] the Mormo[66] and the striges. Over time the first two terms became general words to describe witches and demons respectively. Empusa was the daughter of the goddess Hecate and was described as a demonic, bronze-footed creature. She feasted on blood by transforming into a young woman and seduced men as they slept before drinking their blood.[64] The Lamia preyed on young children in their beds at night, sucking their blood, as did the gelloudes or Gello.[65] Like the Lamia, the striges feasted on children, but also preyed on adults. They were described as having the bodies of crows or birds in general, and were later incorporated into Roman mythology as strix, a kind of nocturnal bird that fed on human flesh and blood.[67] Medieval and later European folklore Main article: Vampire folklore by region Lithograph by R. de Moraine from 1864 showing townsfolk burning the exhumed skeleton of an alleged vampire. Many myths surrounding vampires originated during the medieval period. The 12th-century British historians and chroniclers Walter Map and William of Newburgh recorded accounts of revenants,[18][68] though records in English legends of vampiric beings after this date are scant.[69] The Old Norse draugr is another medieval example of an undead creature with similarities to vampires.[70] Vampiric beings were rarely written about in Jewish literature; the 16th-century rabbi David ben Solomon ibn Abi Zimra (Radbaz) wrote of an uncharitable old woman whose body was unguarded and unburied for three days after she died and rose as a vampiric entity, killing hundreds of people. He linked this event to the lack of a shmirah (guarding) after death as the corpse could be a vessel for evil spirits.[71] Two of the earliest historical recordings of vampire activity in Europe[72][73] can be found in the Neplach's Chronicle (14th century, probably written in 1360). For the year 1336 he mentions a shepherd named Myslata from Blov. He died and was buried but he didn't stay in the grave. Each evening he walked around, spoke to people as if being alive and was scaring them. Soon, he started killing the people and if he stopped by someone's home and called their name, said person died in 8 days. So the people of several villages decided to exhumate him and burn the body. During the process, he let out a loud scream. Someone stabbed him with a stick and a lot of blood came out of the wound. After he was burned, all of the evil events stopped. The second case happened 1344. Neplach writes about a wooman from Levín who after being buried came back, killed several people and danced on them. Once she was exhumated and a stake was put through her, blood started pouring out of her as if she was alive. She also ate her clothes and once removed from her mouth, the cloth was bloody as well. Even after that, she was still attacking villagers so they decided to burn her. However, the wood wouldn't catch fire until they used pieces of the church roof to start it.[74] Both of these cases were later mentioned in the book Magia posthuma by Karl Ferdinand Schertz (1704) that intended to denounce the widespread folk belief in vampires.[75] Vampires properly originating in folklore were widely reported from Eastern Europe in the late 17th and 18th centuries. These tales formed the basis of the vampire legend that later entered Germany and England, where they were subsequently embellished and popularized. An early recording of the time came from the region of Istria in modern Croatia, in 1672.[76] Local reports described a panic among the villagers inspired by the belief that Jure Grando had become a vampire after dying in 1656.[77] Local villagers claimed he returned from the dead and began drinking blood from the people and sexually harassing his widow. The village leader ordered a stake to be driven through his heart. Later, his corpse was also beheaded.[78] 18th-century vampire controversy During the 18th century, there was a frenzy of vampire sightings in Eastern Europe, with frequent stakings and grave diggings to identify and kill the potential revenants. Even government officials engaged in the hunting and staking of vampires.[79] Despite being called the Age of Enlightenment, during which most folkloric legends were quelled, the belief in vampires increased dramatically, resulting in a mass hysteria throughout most of Europe.[18] The panic began with an outbreak of alleged vampire attacks in East Prussia in 1721 and in the Habsburg monarchy from 1725 to 1734, which spread to other localities. Two infamous vampire cases, the first to be officially recorded, involved the corpses of Petar Blagojevich and Miloš Čečar from Serbia. Blagojevich was reported to have died at the age of 62, but allegedly returned after his death asking his son for food. When the son refused, he was found dead the following day. Blagojevich supposedly returned and attacked some neighbours who died from loss of blood.[79] In the second case, Miloš, an ex-soldier-turned-farmer who allegedly was attacked by a vampire years before, died while haying. After his death, people began to die in the surrounding area and it was widely believed that Miloš had returned to prey on the neighbours.[80][81] Another infamous Serbian vampire legend recounts the story of a certain Sava Savanović, who lives in a watermill and kills and drinks blood from the millers. The character was later used in a story written by Serbian writer Milovan Glišić and in the Yugoslav 1973 horror film Leptirica inspired by the story.[82] The two incidents were well-documented. Government officials examined the bodies, wrote case reports, and published books throughout Europe.[81] The hysteria, commonly referred to as the "18th-Century Vampire Controversy", raged for a generation. The problem was exacerbated by rural epidemics of so-called vampire attacks, undoubtedly caused by the higher amount of superstition that was present in village communities, with locals digging up bodies and in some cases, staking them.[83] Dissertations on vampirology In 1597, King James wrote a dissertation on witchcraft titled Daemonologie in which he wrote the belief that demons could possess both the living and the dead. Within his classification of demons, he explained the concept through the notion that incubi and succubae could possess the corpse of the deceased and walk the earth. As a devil borrows a dead body, it would seem so visibly and naturally to any man who converses with them and that any substance within the body would remain intolerably cold to others which they abuse.[84] In 1645 the Greek librarian of the Vatican, Leo Allatius, produced the first methodological description of the Balkan beliefs in vampires (Greek: vrykolakas) in his work De Graecorum hodie quorundam opinationibus ("On certain modern opinions among the Greeks").[85] In 1652, the Wallachian Voivode Matei Basarab passed the first law that mentioned the belief in vampires (in Romanian "Strigoi"), called Îndreptarea legii (The right-making of the law). The paragraph contains the opinion and recommendation of the Patriarch Postnicul over "The deceased, which they will learn to be Strigoi, which is called vrykolakas, what needs to be done". The Patriarch proceeds in describing the belief:[86]     I've heard in many cities and towns, it's said, some dreadful things being done, which are below praise and great foolishness and lack of knowledge of people over the work of the devil. For that our enemy, the most unclean, the devil where he finds an empty place to dwell and do his will, there he indeed dwells and many times with deceiving apparitions towards lots of [bad] deeds he lures the people and leads them towards his will in order that every wretch people like them to sink and drown in the depth of the damnation of the eternal fire. There are some foolish people that say that many times when people die, they rise and become Strigoi and kill those alive, which death comes in a violent way and quick towards many people. The patriarch describes the Strigoi sightings (especially the blood on a long time deceased body) as demonic deceiving and forbids anyone, especially the clergy, from desecrating the graves or burning the bodies of the dead, calling it a sin for which they end up in Hell. Even though it was not permitted to desecrate the grave of the dead person in any way or to burn the dead body, the patriarch offers some remedies in then event of such demonic apparitions:     And then you must know if they will learn about such a [dead] body which is the work of the devil, call the priest to read the Paraklesis of the Theotokos and he shall perform the House blessing service, and shall perform liturgy and make Holy Water in aid of everyone and shall also give Koliva as alms and thereafter he shall say the curse of the devil exorcism Exorcism of St. John Chrysostom. And the both exorcisms performed at Baptism you shall read towards those bones [of the dead]. And then the Holy Water from the House Blessing liturgy you shall splash the people which will happen to be there and then more Holy Water you shall pour over that dead body and with the gift of Christ, the devil shall perish.[86] Première page du Tractat von dem Kauen und Schmatzen der Todten in Gräbern (1734), ouvrage de vampirologie de Michael Ranft Title page of treatise on the chewing and smacking of the dead in graves (1734), a book on vampirology by Michael Ranft. From 1679, Philippe Rohr devotes an essay to the dead who chew their shrouds in their graves, a subject resumed by Otto in 1732, and then by Michael Ranft in 1734. The subject was based on the observation that when digging up graves, it was discovered that some corpses had at some point either devoured the interior fabric of their coffin or their own limbs.[87] Ranft described in his treatise of a tradition in some parts of Germany, that to prevent the dead from masticating they placed a mound of dirt under their chin in the coffin, placed a piece of money and a stone in the mouth, or tied a handkerchief tightly around the throat.[88] In 1732 an anonymous writer writing as "the doctor Weimar" discusses the non-putrefaction of these creatures, from a theological point of view.[89] In 1733, Johann Christoph Harenberg wrote a general treatise on vampirism and the Marquis d'Argens cites local cases. Theologians and clergymen also address the topic.[90] Some theological disputes arose. The non-decay of vampires' bodies could recall the incorruption of the bodies of the saints of the Catholic Church. A paragraph on vampires was included in the second edition (1749) of De servorum Dei beatificatione et sanctorum canonizatione, On the beatification of the servants of God and on canonization of the blessed, written by Prospero Lambertini (Pope Benedict XIV).[91] In his opinion, while the incorruption of the bodies of saints was the effect of a divine intervention, all the phenomena attributed to vampires were purely natural or the fruit of "imagination, terror and fear". In other words, vampires did not exist.[92] Cover page of Treatise on the Apparitions of Spirits and on Vampires or Revenants (1751). Engraving of Dom Augustine Calmet from 1750 Dom Augustine Calmet, a French theologian and scholar, published a comprehensive treatise in 1751 titled Treatise on the Apparitions of Spirits and on Vampires or Revenants which investigated the existence of vampires, demons, and spectres. Calmet conducted extensive research and amassed judicial reports of vampiric incidents and extensively researched theological and mythological accounts as well, using the scientific method in his analysis to come up with methods for determining the validity for cases of this nature. As he stated in his treatise:[93]     They see, it is said, men who have been dead for several months, come back to earth, talk, walk, infest villages, ill use both men and beasts, suck the blood of their near relations, make them ill, and finally cause their death; so that people can only save themselves from their dangerous visits and their hauntings by exhuming them, impaling them, cutting off their heads, tearing out the heart, or burning them. These revenants are called by the name of oupires or vampires, that is to say, leeches; and such particulars are related of them, so singular, so detailed, and invested with such probable circumstances and such judicial information, that one can hardly refuse to credit the belief which is held in those countries, that these revenants come out of their tombs and produce those effects which are proclaimed of them. Calmet had numerous readers, including both a critical Voltaire and numerous supportive demonologists who interpreted the treatise as claiming that vampires existed.[83] In the Philosophical Dictionary, Voltaire wrote:[94]     These vampires were corpses, who went out of their graves at night to suck the blood of the living, either at their throats or stomachs, after which they returned to their cemeteries. The persons so sucked waned, grew pale, and fell into consumption; while the sucking corpses grew fat, got rosy, and enjoyed an excellent appetite. It was in Poland, Hungary, Silesia, Moravia, Austria, and Lorraine, that the dead made this good cheer. The controversy in Austria only ceased when Empress Maria Theresa of Austria sent her personal physician, Gerard van Swieten, to investigate the claims of vampiric entities. He concluded that vampires did not exist and the Empress passed laws prohibiting the opening of graves and desecration of bodies, sounding the end of the vampire epidemics. Other European countries followed suit. Despite this condemnation, the vampire lived on in artistic works and in local folklore.[83] Non-European beliefs Beings having many of the attributes of European vampires appear in the folklore of Africa, Asia, North and South America, and India. Classified as vampires, all share the thirst for blood.[95] Africa Various regions of Africa have folktales featuring beings with vampiric abilities: in West Africa the Ashanti people tell of the iron-toothed and tree-dwelling asanbosam,[96] and the Ewe people of the adze, which can take the form of a firefly and hunts children.[97] The eastern Cape region has the impundulu, which can take the form of a large taloned bird and can summon thunder and lightning, and the Betsileo people of Madagascar tell of the ramanga, an outlaw or living vampire who drinks the blood and eats the nail clippings of nobles.[98] In colonial East Africa, rumors circulated to the effect that employees of the state such as firemen and nurses were vampires, known in Swahili as wazimamoto.[99] The Americas The Loogaroo is an example of how a vampire belief can result from a combination of beliefs, here a mixture of French and African Vodu or voodoo. The term Loogaroo possibly comes from the French loup-garou (meaning "werewolf") and is common in the culture of Mauritius. The stories of the Loogaroo are widespread through the Caribbean Islands and Louisiana in the United States.[100] Similar female monsters are the Soucouyant of Trinidad, and the Tunda and Patasola of Colombian folklore, while the Mapuche of southern Chile have the bloodsucking snake known as the Peuchen.[101] Aloe vera hung backwards behind or near a door was thought to ward off vampiric beings in South American folklore.[30] Aztec mythology described tales of the Cihuateteo, skull-faced spirits of those who died in childbirth who stole children and entered into sexual liaisons with the living, driving them mad.[24] During the late 18th and 19th centuries the belief in vampires was widespread in parts of New England, particularly in Rhode Island and eastern Connecticut. There are many documented cases of families disinterring loved ones and removing their hearts in the belief that the deceased was a vampire who was responsible for sickness and death in the family, although the term "vampire" was never used to describe the dead. The deadly disease tuberculosis, or "consumption" as it was known at the time, was believed to be caused by nightly visitations on the part of a dead family member who had died of consumption themselves.[102] The most famous, and most recently recorded, case of suspected vampirism is that of nineteen-year-old Mercy Brown, who died in Exeter, Rhode Island in 1892. Her father, assisted by the family physician, removed her from her tomb two months after her death, cut out her heart and burned it to ashes.[103] Asia Vampires have appeared in Japanese cinema since the late 1950s; the folklore behind it is western in origin.[104] The Nukekubi is a being whose head and neck detach from its body to fly about seeking human prey at night.[105] Legends of female vampiric beings who can detach parts of their upper body also occur in the Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia. There are two main vampiric creatures in the Philippines: the Tagalog Mandurugo ("blood-sucker") and the Visayan Manananggal ("self-segmenter"). The mandurugo is a variety of the aswang that takes the form of an attractive girl by day, and develops wings and a long, hollow, threadlike tongue by night. The tongue is used to suck up blood from a sleeping victim.[106] The manananggal is described as being an older, beautiful woman capable of severing its upper torso in order to fly into the night with huge batlike wings and prey on unsuspecting, sleeping pregnant women in their homes. They use an elongated proboscislike tongue to suck fetuses from these pregnant women. They also prefer to eat entrails (specifically the heart and the liver) and the phlegm of sick people.[106] The Malaysian Penanggalan is a woman who obtained her beauty through the active use of black magic or other unnatural means, and is most commonly described in local folklore to be dark or demonic in nature. She is able to detach her fanged head which flies around in the night looking for blood, typically from pregnant women.[107] Malaysians hung jeruju (thistles) around the doors and windows of houses, hoping the Penanggalan would not enter for fear of catching its intestines on the thorns.[108] The Leyak is a similar being from Balinese folklore of Indonesia.[109] A Kuntilanak or Matianak in Indonesia,[110] or Pontianak or Langsuir in Malaysia,[111] is a woman who died during childbirth and became undead, seeking revenge and terrorising villages. She appeared as an attractive woman with long black hair that covered a hole in the back of her neck, with which she sucked the blood of children. Filling the hole with her hair would drive her off. Corpses had their mouths filled with glass beads, eggs under each armpit, and needles in their palms to prevent them from becoming langsuir. This description would also fit the Sundel Bolongs.[112] A stilt house typical of the Tai Dam ethnic minority of Vietnam, whose communities were said to be terrorized by the blood-sucking ma cà rồng. In Vietnam, the word used to translate Western vampires, "ma cà rồng", originally referred to a type of demon that haunts modern-day Phú Thọ Province, within the communities of the Tai Dam ethnic minority. The word was first mentioned in the chronicles of 18th-century Confucian scholar Lê Quý Đôn,[113] who spoke of a creature that lives among humans, but stuffs its toes into its nostrils at night and flies by its ears into houses with pregnant women to suck their blood. Having fed on these women, the ma cà rồng then returns to its house and cleans itself by dipping its toes into barrels of sappanwood water. This allows the ma cà rồng to live undetected among humans during the day, before heading out to attack again by night.[114] Jiangshi, sometimes called "Chinese vampires" by Westerners, are reanimated corpses that hop around, killing living creatures to absorb life essence (qì) from their victims. They are said to be created when a person's soul (魄 pò) fails to leave the deceased's body.[115] Jiangshi are usually represented as mindless creatures with no independent thought.[116] This monster has greenish-white furry skin, perhaps derived from fungus or mould growing on corpses.[117] Jiangshi legends have inspired a genre of jiangshi films and literature in Hong Kong and East Asia. Films like Encounters of the Spooky Kind and Mr. Vampire were released during the jiangshi cinematic boom of the 1980s and 1990s.[118][119] Modern beliefs In modern fiction, the vampire tends to be depicted as a suave, charismatic villain.[20] Despite the general disbelief in vampiric entities, occasional sightings of vampires are reported[citation needed]. Vampire hunting societies still exist, but they are largely formed for social reasons.[18] Allegations of vampire attacks swept through Malawi during late 2002 and early 2003, with mobs stoning one person to death and attacking at least four others, including Governor Eric Chiwaya, based on the belief that the government was colluding with vampires.[120] In early 1970 local press spread rumours that a vampire haunted Highgate Cemetery in London. Amateur vampire hunters flocked in large numbers to the cemetery. Several books have been written about the case, notably by Sean Manchester, a local man who was among the first to suggest the existence of the "Highgate Vampire" and who later claimed to have exorcised and destroyed a whole nest of vampires in the area.[121] In January 2005, rumours circulated that an attacker had bitten a number of people in Birmingham, England, fuelling concerns about a vampire roaming the streets. Local police stated that no such crime had been reported and that the case appears to be an urban legend.[122] A vampire costume In 2006, a physics professor at the University of Central Florida wrote a paper arguing that it is mathematically impossible for vampires to exist, based on geometric progression. According to the paper, if the first vampire had appeared on 1 January 1600, if it fed once a month (which is less often than what is depicted in films and folklore), and if every victim turned into a vampire, then within two and a half years the entire human population of the time would have become vampires.[123] In one of the more notable cases of vampiric entities in the modern age, the chupacabra ("goat-sucker") of Puerto Rico and Mexico is said to be a creature that feeds upon the flesh or drinks the blood of domesticated animals, leading some to consider it a kind of vampire. The "chupacabra hysteria" was frequently associated with deep economic and political crises, particularly during the mid-1990s.[124] In Europe, where much of the vampire folklore originates, the vampire is usually considered a fictitious being; many communities may have embraced the revenant for economic purposes. In some cases, especially in small localities, beliefs are still rampant and sightings or claims of vampire attacks occur frequently. In Romania during February 2004, several relatives of Toma Petre feared that he had become a vampire. They dug up his corpse, tore out his heart, burned it, and mixed the ashes with water in order to drink it.[125] In September / October 2017, mob violence in Malawi related to a vampire scare killed about 6 people accused of being vampires.[126] A similar spate of vigilante violence linked to vampire rumours occurred there in 2002.[127] Vampirism and the vampire lifestyle also represent a relevant part of modern day's occultist movements.[128] The mythos of the vampire, his magickal qualities, allure, and predatory archetype express a strong symbolism that can be used in ritual, energy work, and magick, and can even be adopted as a spiritual system.[129] The vampire has been part of the occult society in Europe for centuries and has spread into the American subculture as well for more than a decade, being strongly influenced by and mixed with the neo gothic aesthetics.[130] Collective noun "Coven" has been used as a collective noun for vampires, possibly based on the Wiccan usage. An alternative collective noun is a "house" of vampires.[131] Origins of vampire beliefs Commentators have offered many theories for the origins of vampire beliefs and related mass hysteria. Everything ranging from premature burial to the early ignorance of the body's decomposition cycle after death has been cited as the cause for the belief in vampires.[132] Pathology Decomposition Paul Barber in his book Vampires, Burial and Death has described that belief in vampires resulted from people of pre-industrial societies attempting to explain the natural, but to them inexplicable, process of death and decomposition.[132] People sometimes suspected vampirism when a cadaver did not look as they thought a normal corpse should when disinterred. Rates of decomposition vary depending on temperature and soil composition, and many of the signs are little known. This has led vampire hunters to mistakenly conclude that a dead body had not decomposed at all or, ironically, to interpret signs of decomposition as signs of continued life.[133] Corpses swell as gases from decomposition accumulate in the torso and the increased pressure forces blood to ooze from the nose and mouth. This causes the body to look "plump", "well-fed", and "ruddy"—changes that are all the more striking if the person was pale or thin in life. In the Arnold Paole case, an old woman's exhumed corpse was judged by her neighbours to look more plump and healthy than she had ever looked in life.[134] The exuding blood gave the impression that the corpse had recently been engaging in vampiric activity.[34] Darkening of the skin is also caused by decomposition.[135] The staking of a swollen, decomposing body could cause the body to bleed and force the accumulated gases to escape the body. This could produce a groan-like sound when the gases moved past the vocal cords, or a sound reminiscent of flatulence when they passed through the anus. The official reporting on the Petar Blagojevich case speaks of "other wild signs which I pass by out of high respect".[136] After death, the skin and gums lose fluids and contract, exposing the roots of the hair, nails, and teeth, even teeth that were concealed in the jaw. This can produce the illusion that the hair, nails, and teeth have grown. At a certain stage, the nails fall off and the skin peels away, as reported in the Blagojevich case—the dermis and nail beds emerging underneath were interpreted as "new skin" and "new nails".[136] Premature burial It has also been hypothesized that vampire legends were influenced by individuals being buried alive because of shortcomings in the medical knowledge of the time. In some cases in which people reported sounds emanating from a specific coffin, it was later dug up and fingernail marks were discovered on the inside from the victim trying to escape. In other cases the person would hit their heads, noses or faces and it would appear that they had been "feeding".[137] A problem with this theory is the question of how people presumably buried alive managed to stay alive for any extended period without food, water or fresh air. An alternate explanation for noise is the bubbling of escaping gases from natural decomposition of bodies.[138] Another likely cause of disordered tombs is grave robbery.[139] Contagion Folkloric vampirism has been associated with clusters of deaths from unidentifiable or mysterious illnesses, usually within the same family or the same small community.[102] The epidemic allusion is obvious in the classical cases of Petar Blagojevich and Arnold Paole, and even more so in the case of Mercy Brown and in the vampire beliefs of New England generally, where a specific disease, tuberculosis, was associated with outbreaks of vampirism. As with the pneumonic form of bubonic plague, it was associated with breakdown of lung tissue which would cause blood to appear at the lips.[140] Porphyria In 1985 biochemist David Dolphin proposed a link between the rare blood disorder porphyria and vampire folklore. Noting that the condition is treated by intravenous haem, he suggested that the consumption of large amounts of blood may result in haem being transported somehow across the stomach wall and into the bloodstream. Thus vampires were merely sufferers of porphyria seeking to replace haem and alleviate their symptoms.[141] The theory has been rebuffed medically as suggestions that porphyria sufferers crave the haem in human blood, or that the consumption of blood might ease the symptoms of porphyria, are based on a misunderstanding of the disease. Furthermore, Dolphin was noted to have confused fictional (bloodsucking) vampires with those of folklore, many of whom were not noted to drink blood.[142] Similarly, a parallel is made between sensitivity to sunlight by sufferers, yet this was associated with fictional and not folkloric vampires. In any case, Dolphin did not go on to publish his work more widely.[143] Despite being dismissed by experts, the link gained media attention[144] and entered popular modern folklore.[145] Rabies Rabies has been linked with vampire folklore. Dr Juan Gómez-Alonso, a neurologist at Xeral Hospital in Vigo, Spain, examined this possibility in a report in Neurology. The susceptibility to garlic and light could be due to hypersensitivity, which is a symptom of rabies. It can also affect portions of the brain that could lead to disturbance of normal sleep patterns (thus becoming nocturnal) and hypersexuality. Legend once said a man was not rabid if he could look at his own reflection (an allusion to the legend that vampires have no reflection). Wolves and bats, which are often associated with vampires, can be carriers of rabies. The disease can also lead to a drive to bite others and to a bloody frothing at the mouth.[146][147] Psychodynamic theories In his 1931 treatise On the Nightmare, Welsh psychoanalyst Ernest Jones asserted that vampires are symbolic of several unconscious drives and defence mechanisms. Emotions such as love, guilt, and hate fuel the idea of the return of the dead to the grave. Desiring a reunion with loved ones, mourners may project the idea that the recently dead must in return yearn the same. From this arises the belief that folkloric vampires and revenants visit relatives, particularly their spouses, first.[148] In cases where there was unconscious guilt associated with the relationship, the wish for reunion may be subverted by anxiety. This may lead to repression, which Sigmund Freud had linked with the development of morbid dread.[149] Jones surmised in this case the original wish of a (sexual) reunion may be drastically changed: desire is replaced by fear; love is replaced by sadism, and the object or loved one is replaced by an unknown entity. The sexual aspect may or may not be present.[150] Some modern critics have proposed a simpler theory: People identify with immortal vampires because, by so doing, they overcome, or at least temporarily escape from, their fear of dying.[151] Jones linked the innate sexuality of bloodsucking with cannibalism, with a folkloric connection with incubus-like behaviour. He added that when more normal aspects of sexuality are repressed, regressed forms may be expressed, in particular sadism; he felt that oral sadism is integral in vampiric behaviour.[152] Political interpretations Political cartoon in Punch magazine from 1885, depicting the Irish National League as the "Irish Vampire" preying on a sleeping woman. The reinvention of the vampire myth in the modern era is not without political overtones.[153] The aristocratic Count Dracula, alone in his castle apart from a few demented retainers, appearing only at night to feed on his peasantry, is symbolic of the parasitic ancien régime. In his entry for "Vampires" in the Dictionnaire philosophique (1764), Voltaire notices how the mid-18th century coincided with the decline of the folkloric belief in the existence of vampires but that now "there were stock-jobbers, brokers, and men of business, who sucked the blood of the people in broad daylight; but they were not dead, though corrupted. These true suckers lived not in cemeteries, but in very agreeable palaces".[154] Marx defined capital as "dead labour which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks".[155] Werner Herzog, in his Nosferatu the Vampyre, gives this political interpretation an extra ironic twist when protagonist Jonathan Harker, a middle-class solicitor, becomes the next vampire; in this way the capitalist bourgeois becomes the next parasitic class.[156] Psychopathology A number of murderers have performed seemingly vampiric rituals upon their victims. Serial killers Peter Kürten and Richard Trenton Chase were both called "vampires" in the tabloids after they were discovered drinking the blood of the people they murdered. Similarly, in 1932, an unsolved murder case in Stockholm, Sweden was nicknamed the "Vampire murder", because of the circumstances of the victim's death.[157] The late-16th-century Hungarian countess and mass murderess Elizabeth Báthory became particularly infamous in later centuries' works, which depicted her bathing in her victims' blood in order to retain beauty or youth.[158] Modern vampire subcultures Main article: Vampire lifestyle See also: Psychic vampirism Vampire lifestyle is a term for a contemporary subculture of people, largely within the Goth subculture, who consume the blood of others as a pastime; drawing from the rich recent history of popular culture related to cult symbolism, horror films, the fiction of Anne Rice, and the styles of Victorian England.[159] Active vampirism within the vampire subculture includes both blood-related vampirism, commonly referred to as sanguine vampirism, and psychic vampirism, or supposed feeding from pranic energy.[128][160] Vampire bats Main article: Vampire bat A vampire bat in Peru. Although many cultures have stories about them, vampire bats have only recently become an integral part of the traditional vampire lore. Vampire bats were integrated into vampire folklore after they were discovered on the South American mainland in the 16th century.[161] There are no vampire bats in Europe, but bats and owls have long been associated with the supernatural and omens, mainly because of their nocturnal habits,[161][162] and in modern English heraldic tradition, a bat means "Awareness of the powers of darkness and chaos".[163] The three species of vampire bats are all endemic to Latin America, and there is no evidence to suggest that they had any Old World relatives within human memory. It is therefore impossible that the folkloric vampire represents a distorted presentation or memory of the vampire bat. The bats were named after the folkloric vampire rather than vice versa; the Oxford English Dictionary records their folkloric use in English from 1734 and the zoological not until 1774. The danger of rabies infection aside, the vampire bat's bite is usually not harmful to a person, but the bat has been known to actively feed on humans and large prey such as cattle and often leaves the trademark, two-prong bite mark on its victim's skin.[161] The literary Dracula transforms into a bat several times in the novel, and vampire bats themselves are mentioned twice in it. The 1927 stage production of Dracula followed the novel in having Dracula turn into a bat, as did the film, where Béla Lugosi would transform into a bat.[161] The bat transformation scene was used again by Lon Chaney Jr. in 1943's Son of Dracula.[164] In modern fiction See also: List of vampires The vampire is now a fixture in popular fiction. Such fiction began with 18th-century poetry and continued with 19th-century short stories, the first and most influential of which was John Polidori's "The Vampyre" (1819), featuring the vampire Lord Ruthven.[165] Lord Ruthven's exploits were further explored in a series of vampire plays in which he was the antihero. The vampire theme continued in penny dreadful serial publications such as Varney the Vampire (1847) and culminated in the pre-eminent vampire novel in history: Dracula by Bram Stoker, published in 1897.[166] Over time, some attributes now regarded as integral became incorporated into the vampire's profile: fangs and vulnerability to sunlight appeared over the course of the 19th century, with Varney the Vampire and Count Dracula both bearing protruding teeth,[167] and Count Orlok of Murnau's Nosferatu (1922) fearing daylight.[168] The cloak appeared in stage productions of the 1920s, with a high collar introduced by playwright Hamilton Deane to help Dracula 'vanish' on stage.[169] Lord Ruthven and Varney were able to be healed by moonlight, although no account of this is known in traditional folklore.[170] Implied though not often explicitly documented in folklore, immortality is one attribute which features heavily in vampire film and literature. Much is made of the price of eternal life, namely the incessant need for blood of former equals.[171] Literature Main article: Vampire literature Cover from one of the original serialized editions of Varney the Vampire, an influential publication in the development of the modern vampire genre.[166] The vampire or revenant first appeared in poems such as The Vampire (1748) by Heinrich August Ossenfelder, Lenore (1773) by Gottfried August Bürger, Die Braut von Corinth (The Bride of Corinth) (1797) by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Robert Southey's Thalaba the Destroyer (1801), John Stagg's "The Vampyre" (1810), Percy Bysshe Shelley's "The Spectral Horseman" (1810) ("Nor a yelling vampire reeking with gore") and "Ballad" in St. Irvyne (1811) about a reanimated corpse, Sister Rosa, Samuel Taylor Coleridge's unfinished Christabel and Lord Byron's The Giaour.[172] Byron was also credited with the first prose fiction piece concerned with vampires: "The Vampyre" (1819). This was in reality authored by Byron's personal physician, John Polidori, who adapted an enigmatic fragmentary tale of his illustrious patient, "Fragment of a Novel" (1819), also known as "The Burial: A Fragment".[18][166] Byron's own dominating personality, mediated by his lover Lady Caroline Lamb in her unflattering roman-a-clef Glenarvon (a Gothic fantasia based on Byron's wild life), was used as a model for Polidori's undead protagonist Lord Ruthven. The Vampyre was highly successful and the most influential vampire work of the early 19th century.[173] Carmilla by Sheridan Le Fanu, illustrated by D. H. Friston, 1872. Varney the Vampire was a popular landmark mid-Victorian era gothic horror story by James Malcolm Rymer and Thomas Peckett Prest, which first appeared from 1845 to 1847 in a series of pamphlets generally referred to as penny dreadfuls because of their inexpensive price and typically gruesome contents.[165] The story was published in book form in 1847 and runs to 868 double-columned pages. It has a distinctly suspenseful style, using vivid imagery to describe the horrifying exploits of Varney.[170] Another important addition to the genre was Sheridan Le Fanu's lesbian vampire story Carmilla (1871). Like Varney before her, the vampiress Carmilla is portrayed in a somewhat sympathetic light as the compulsion of her condition is highlighted.[174] No effort to depict vampires in popular fiction was as influential or as definitive as Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897).[175] Its portrayal of vampirism as a disease of contagious demonic possession, with its undertones of sex, blood and death, struck a chord in Victorian Europe where tuberculosis and syphilis were common. The vampiric traits described in Stoker's work merged with and dominated folkloric tradition, eventually evolving into the modern fictional vampire.[165] Drawing on past works such as The Vampyre and Carmilla, Stoker began to research his new book in the late 19th century, reading works such as The Land Beyond the Forest (1888) by Emily Gerard and other books about Transylvania and vampires. In London, a colleague mentioned to him the story of Vlad Ţepeş, the "real-life Dracula", and Stoker immediately incorporated this story into his book. The first chapter of the book was omitted when it was published in 1897, but it was released in 1914 as "Dracula's Guest".[176] Many experts believe, this deleted opening was based on the Austrian princess Eleonore von Schwarzenberg.[177] The latter part of the 20th century saw the rise of multi-volume vampire epics as well as a renewed interest in the subject in books. The first of these was Gothic romance writer Marilyn Ross's Barnabas Collins series (1966–71), loosely based on the contemporary American TV series Dark Shadows. It also set the trend for seeing vampires as poetic tragic heroes rather than as the more traditional embodiment of evil. This formula was followed in novelist Anne Rice's highly popular and influential Vampire Chronicles (1976–2003).[178] Stephen King, while not a writer of multi-volume epics on vampires, has become a very influential horror writer of the late 20th and early 21st century, evidenced by the nearly sixty books he has published over the past 50 years selling around the world in multiple languages. King's repertoire often hybridizes traditional vampire folklore with the coy charm inspired by Bela Lugosi's performance while increasing the physical violence, carnage, and overall butchery. His work describes very graphically in detail the ruthlessness of what essentially is a supernatural, parasitic predator that unleashes itself and intrudes on ordinary life for ordinary people, a recurring theme of his books. According to King himself, he was still a teacher at a high school when one of the books the class was studying was Bram Stoker's Dracula. Over dinner, he asked his wife, Tabitha, what would happen if Dracula came back in the 20th century. "He'd probably be run over by a Yellow Cab on Park Avenue and killed," his wife replied, and it was from there that she suggested a different, rural setting.[179] Salem's Lot, the book that resulted from that conversation, was published in 1975 as the follow up to Carrie[179]; as of 2022, the process of weaving vampires into his stories is still ongoing. King's overall body of work spans both the late 20th and early 21st centuries and Salem's Lot has over the years become one of his most important works.[180] The title references a Maine town called Jerusalem's Lot and it is the centerpiece of 2 full novels and one short story, plus twelve other books that reference the town's existence within the multiverse that runs through all Stephen King books.[181] King also has written several other works with vampires included in them in both long and short form including The Little Sisters of Elluria (1998), The Nightflier (1993, in Nightmares and Dreamscapes), and several books in his series The Dark Tower (1982-2012) which also contains at least one character from Salem's Lot. Many of these have been brought to film and television as well as comic books.[182][183] The 21st century brought more examples of vampire fiction, such as J. R. Ward's Black Dagger Brotherhood series, and other highly popular vampire books which appeal to teenagers and young adults. Such vampiric paranormal romance novels and allied vampiric chick-lit and vampiric occult detective stories are a remarkably popular and ever-expanding contemporary publishing phenomenon.[184] L. A. Banks' The Vampire Huntress Legend Series, Laurell K. Hamilton's erotic Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter series, and Kim Harrison's The Hollows series, portray the vampire in a variety of new perspectives, some of them unrelated to the original legends. Vampires in the Twilight series (2005–2008) by Stephenie Meyer ignore the effects of garlic and crosses and are not harmed by sunlight, although it does reveal their supernatural status.[185] Richelle Mead further deviates from traditional vampires in her Vampire Academy series (2007–2010), basing the novels on Romanian lore with two races of vampires, one good and one evil, as well as half-vampires.[186] Film and television Main articles: Vampire film, List of vampire films, and List of vampire television series A scene from F. W. Murnau's Nosferatu, 1922. Considered one of the preeminent figures of the classic horror film, the vampire has proven to be a rich subject for the film, television, and gaming industries. Dracula is a major character in more films than any other but Sherlock Holmes, and many early films were either based on the novel Dracula or closely derived from it. These included the highly important 1922 silent German Expressionist horror film Nosferatu, directed by F. W. Murnau and featuring the first film portrayal of Dracula—although names and characters were intended to mimic Dracula's. Unfortunately for Murnau, Stoker's widow got a hold of the information that someone had created a film based on her husband's work, and spent many years fighting Prana, the production company in court. She eventually demanded that all copies of Nosferatu be destroyed; for this reason there is no master copy or 100% complete print of this film remaining.[187] In spite of her best efforts, however, the film survived in fragments and, since Stoker's widow never properly registered the copyright in the United States, a print that wound up there was able to become the foundation stone for its nearly complete restoration by the second half of the 20th century.[188][189] Universal's Dracula (1931), starring Béla Lugosi as the Count and directed by Tod Browning, was the first talking film to portray Dracula. Both Lugosi's performance and the film overall became extremely influential in the blossoming horror film genre, now able to utilize sound and special effects much more efficiently than in the Silent Film Era. The influence of this 1931 film lasted throughout the rest of the 20th century and up through the present day. Stephen King, Francis Ford Coppola, Hammer Horror, and Philip Saville each have at one time or another derived inspiration from this film directly either through staging or even through directly quoting the film, particularly how Stoker's line "Listen to them. Children of the night. What music they make!" is delivered by Lugosi; for example Coppola paid homage to this moment with Gary Oldman in his interpretation of the tale in 1992 and King has credited this film as an inspiration for his character Kurt Barlow repeatedly in interviews.[190][191] It is for these reasons that the film was selected by the US Library of Congress to be in the National Film Registry in 2000.[192] Count Dracula as portrayed by Béla Lugosi in 1931's Dracula. The legend of the vampire continued through the film industry when Dracula was reincarnated in the pertinent Hammer Horror series of films, starring Christopher Lee as the Count. The successful 1958 Dracula starring Lee was followed by seven sequels. Lee returned as Dracula in all but two of these and became well known in the role.[193] By the 1970s, vampires in films had diversified with works such as Count Yorga, Vampire (1970), an African Count in 1972's Blacula, the BBC's Count Dracula featuring French actor Louis Jourdan as Dracula and Frank Finlay as Abraham Van Helsing, and a Nosferatu-like vampire in 1979's Salem's Lot, and a remake of Nosferatu itself, titled Nosferatu the Vampyre with Klaus Kinski the same year. Several films featured the characterization of a female, often lesbian, vampire such as Hammer Horror's The Vampire Lovers (1970), based on Carmilla, though the plotlines still revolved around a central evil vampire character.[193] 1960s television's Dark Shadows, with Jonathan Frid's Barnabas Collins vampire character. The Gothic soap opera Dark Shadows, on American television from 1966 to 1971 and produced by Dan Curtis, featured the vampire character Barnabas Collins, portrayed by Canadian actor Jonathan Frid, which proved partly responsible for making the series one of the most popular of its type, amassing a total of 1,225 episodes in its nearly five-year run. The pilot for the later Dan Curtis 1972 television series Kolchak: The Night Stalker revolved around reporter Carl Kolchak hunting a vampire on the Las Vegas Strip. Later films showed more diversity in plotline, with some focusing on the vampire-hunter, such as Blade in the Marvel Comics' Blade films and the film Buffy the Vampire Slayer.[165] Buffy, released in 1992, foreshadowed a vampiric presence on television, with its adaptation to a long-running hit series of the same name and its spin-off Angel. Still others showed the vampire as a protagonist, such as 1983's The Hunger, 1994's Interview with the Vampire and its indirect sequel of sorts Queen of the Damned, and the 2007 series Moonlight. The 1992 film Bram Stoker's Dracula by Francis Ford Coppola became the then-highest grossing vampire film ever.[194] In his documentary "Vampire Princess" (2007) the investigative Austrian author and director Klaus T. Steindl discovered in 2007 the historical inspiration for Bram Stoker's legendary Dracula character (see also Literature - Bram Stoker: Dracula's Guest[176]): "Many experts believe, the deleted opening was actually based on a woman. Archaeologists, historians, and forensic scientists revisit the days of vampire hysteria in the eighteenth-century Czech Republic and re-open the unholy grave of dark princess Eleonore von Schwarzenberg. They uncover her story, once buried and long forgotten, now raised from the dead."[177] This increase of interest in vampiric plotlines led to the vampire being depicted in films such as Underworld and Van Helsing, the Russian Night Watch and a TV miniseries remake of Salem's Lot, both from 2004. The series Blood Ties premiered on Lifetime Television in 2007, featuring a character portrayed as Henry Fitzroy, an illegitimate-son-of-Henry-VIII-of-England-turned-vampire, in modern-day Toronto, with a female former Toronto detective in the starring role. A 2008 series from HBO, entitled True Blood, gives a Southern Gothic take on the vampire theme.[185] In 2008 the BBC Three series Being Human became popular in Britain. It featured an unconventional trio of a vampire, a werewolf and a ghost who are sharing a flat in Bristol.[195][196] Another popular vampire-related show is CW's The Vampire Diaries. The continuing popularity of the vampire theme has been ascribed to a combination of two factors: the representation of sexuality and the perennial dread of mortality.[197] Salem's Lot is due to be released in September 2022 for the first time as a full-length motion picture rather than a miniseries. Games Main article: Vampires in games The role-playing game Vampire: The Masquerade has been influential upon modern vampire fiction and elements of its terminology, such as embrace and sire, appear in contemporary fiction.[165] Popular video games about vampires include Castlevania, which is an extension of the original Bram Stoker novel Dracula, and Legacy of Kain.[198] The role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons features vampires." (wikipedia.orG) "Count Dracula (/ˈdrækjʊlə, -jələ/) is the title character of Bram Stoker's 1897 gothic horror novel Dracula. He is considered to be both the prototypical and the archetypal vampire in subsequent works of fiction. Some aspects of the character are believed to have been inspired by the 15th-century Wallachian Prince Vlad the Impaler, who was also known as Dracula, and by Sir Henry Irving, an actor for whom Stoker was a personal assistant.[12] One of Dracula's most iconic powers is his ability to turn others into vampires by biting them and infecting them with the vampiric disease. Other character aspects have been added or altered in subsequent popular fictional works. The character has appeared frequently in popular culture, from films to animated media to breakfast cereals. ... Stoker's creation Bram Stoker's novel takes the form of an epistolary tale, in which Count Dracula's characteristics, powers, abilities and weaknesses are narrated by multiple narrators, from different perspectives.[13] Count Dracula is an undead, centuries-old vampire, and a Transylvanian nobleman who claims to be a Székely descended from Attila the Hun.[14] He inhabits a decaying castle in the Carpathian Mountains near the Borgo Pass. Unlike the vampires of Eastern European folklore, which are portrayed as repulsive, corpse-like creatures, Dracula is handsome and charismatic, with a veneer of aristocratic charm. In his conversations with Jonathan Harker, he reveals himself as deeply proud of his boyar heritage and nostalgic for the past, which he admits has become only a memory of heroism, honour and valour in modern times. Early life Wiki letter w.svg     This article is missing information about Dracula's backstory outlined in the 2018 prequel novel Dracul, written by Dacre Stoker from Bram Stoker's manuscripts.. Please expand the article to include this information. Further details may exist on the talk page. (November 2020) Details of his early life are undisclosed, but it is mentioned that     he was in life a most wonderful man. Soldier, statesman, and alchemist. Which latter was the highest development of the scientific knowledge of his time. He had a mighty brain, a learning beyond compare, and a heart that knew no fear and no remorse... there was no branch of knowledge of his time that he did not essay.[15] Dracula studied the black arts at the academy of Scholomance in the Carpathian Mountains, overlooking the town of Sibiu (also known as Hermannstadt) and has a deep knowledge of alchemy and magic.[16] Taking up arms, as befitting his rank and status as a voivode, he led troops against the Turks across the Danube. According to his nemesis Abraham Van Helsing, "He must indeed have been that Voivode Dracula who won his name against the Turk, over the great river on the very frontier of Turkey-land. If it be so, then was he no common man: for in that time, and for centuries after, he was spoken of as the cleverest and the most cunning, as well as the bravest of the sons of the land beyond the forest."[17] Dead and buried in a great tomb in the chapel of his castle, Dracula returns from death as a vampire and lives for several centuries in his castle with three terrifyingly beautiful female vampires beside him.[18] Narrative Short story Cover of Dracula's Guest and Other Weird Stories, a collection of short stories authored by Bram Stoker In "Dracula's Guest", the narrative follows an unnamed Englishman traveller as he wanders around Munich before leaving for Transylvania. It is Walpurgis Night and the young Englishman foolishly leaves his hotel, in spite of the coachman's warnings, and wanders through a dense forest alone. Along the way, he feels that he is being watched by a tall and thin stranger. The short story climaxes in an old graveyard, where the Englishman encounters a sleeping female vampire called Countess Dolingen in a marble tomb with a large iron stake driven into it. This malevolent and beautiful vampire awakens from her marble bier to conjure a snowstorm before being struck by lightning and returning to her eternal prison. However, the Englishman's troubles are not quite over, as he is dragged away by an unseen force and rendered unconscious. He awakens to find a "gigantic" wolf lying on his chest and licking at his throat; however, the wolf merely keeps him warm and protects him until help arrives. When the Englishman is finally taken back to his hotel, a telegram awaits him from his expectant host Dracula, with a warning about "dangers from snow and wolves and night". Novel In Dracula, the eponymous vampire has decided to move from Transylvania to London. He summons Jonathan Harker, a newly qualified English solicitor, to provide legal support for a real estate transaction overseen by Harker's employer. Dracula at first charms Harker with his cordiality and historical knowledge, and even rescues him from the clutches of the three female vampires in the castle. In truth, however, Dracula merely wishes to keep Harker alive long enough to complete the legal transaction and to learn as much as possible about England. Ruins of Whitby Abbey in Whitby. As a creature resembling a large dog which came ashore at the Whitby headland, Count Dracula runs up the 199 steps to the graveyard of St Mary's Church in the shadow of the abbey ruins Dracula leaves his castle and boards a Russian ship, the Demeter, taking along with him 50 boxes of Transylvanian soil, which he needs to regain his strength and rest during daylight. During the voyage to Whitby, a coastal town in northern England, he sustains himself on the ship's crew members. Only one body is later found, that of the captain, who is found tied up to the ship's helm. The captain's log is recovered and tells of strange events that had taken place during the ship's journey. Dracula leaves the ship in the form of a dog and runs up the 199 steps to the graveyard of St Mary's Church in the shadow of the Whitby Abbey ruins. Soon the Count begins menacing Harker's fiancée, Wilhelmina "Mina" Murray, and her friend, Lucy Westenra. There is also a notable link between Dracula and Renfield, a patient in an insane asylum overseen by John Seward, who is compelled to consume spiders, birds, and other creatures—in ascending order of size—to absorb their "life force". Renfield acts as a kind of sensor, reacting to Dracula's proximity and supplying clues accordingly. Dracula visits Lucy's bed chamber on a nightly basis, draining her of blood while simultaneously infecting her with the curse of vampirism. Not knowing the cause for Lucy's deterioration, her three suitors – Seward, Arthur Holmwood and Quincey Morris – call upon Seward's mentor, the Dutch doctor Abraham Van Helsing. Van Helsing soon deduces her condition's supernatural origins, and tries to keep the vampire at bay with garlic. Nevertheless, Dracula attacks Lucy's house one final time, killing her mother and transforming Lucy herself into one of the undead. Colorized stills of Edward Van Sloan as Van Helsing confronting Bela Lugosi in Dracula (1931) Harker escapes Dracula's castle and returns to England, barely alive and deeply traumatized. On Seward's suggestion, Mina seeks Van Helsing's assistance in assessing Harker's health. She reads his journal and passes it along to Van Helsing. This unfolds the first clue to the identity of Lucy's assailant, which later prompts Mina to collect all of the events of Dracula's appearance in news articles, saved letters, newspaper clippings and the journals of each member of the group. This assists the group in investigating Dracula's movements and later discovering that Renfield's behaviour is directly influenced by Dracula. They then discover that Dracula has purchased a residence next door to Seward's. The group gathers intelligence to track down Dracula and destroy him. After the undead Lucy attacks several children, Van Helsing, Seward, Holmwood and Morris enter her crypt and destroy her to save her soul. Later, Harker joins them and the party work to discover Dracula's intentions. Harker aids the party in tracking down the locations of the boxes to the various residences of Dracula and discovers that Dracula purchased multiple real estate properties throughout London[19] under the alias 'Count De Ville'.[20] Dracula's main plan was to move each of his 50 boxes of earth to his various properties in order to arrange multiple lairs throughout and around the perimeter of London.[19] The party pries open each of the graves, places sacramental wafers within each of them, and seals them shut. This deprives Dracula of his ability to seek safety in those boxes.[21] Dracula gains entry into Seward's residence by coercing an invitation out of Renfield. As he attempts to enter the room in which Harker and Mina are staying, Renfield tries to stop him; Dracula then mortally wounds him. With his dying breath, Renfield tells Seward and Van Helsing that Dracula is after Mina. Van Helsing and Seward discover Dracula biting Mina and forcing her to drink his blood. The group repel Dracula using crucifixes and sacramental bread, forcing him to flee by turning into a dark vapour. The party continue to hunt Dracula to search for his remaining lairs.[22] Although Dracula's 'baptism' of Mina grants him a telepathic link to her, it backfires when Van Helsing hypnotizes Mina and uses her supernatural link with Dracula to track him as he flees back to Transylvania. The heroes follow Dracula back to Transylvania, and in a climactic battle with Dracula's Romani bodyguards, finally destroy him. Despite the popular image of Dracula having a stake driven through his heart to kill him, Mina's narrative describes his decapitation by Harker's kukri while Morris simultaneously pierces his heart with a Bowie knife (Mina Harker's Journal, 6 November, Dracula Chapter 27). His body then turns into dust, but not before Mina sees an expression of peace on his face. Characteristics     "Listen to them—the children of the night. What music they make!". — Count Dracula to Jonathan Harker, referring to the howling of the wolves. Dracula, Chapter 2.[23] Although early in the novel Dracula dons a mask of cordiality, he often flies into fits of rage when his plans are frustrated. When Dracula's brides attempt to seduce Jonathan Harker, Dracula physically assaults one and ferociously berates them for their insubordination. He has an appreciation for ancient architecture, and when purchasing a home he prefers them to be aged, saying "A new home would kill me", and that to make a new home habitable to him would take a century.[24] Dracula is very proud of his warrior heritage, proclaiming his pride to Harker on how the Székely people are infused with the blood of heroes. He also expresses an interest in the history of the British Empire, speaking admiringly of its people. He has a somewhat primal and predatory worldview; he pities ordinary humans for their revulsion to their darker impulses. He is not without human emotions, however; he often says that he too can love.[25] Though usually portrayed as having a strong Eastern European accent, the original novel only specifies that his spoken English is excellent, though strangely toned. His appearance varies in age. He is described early in the novel as thin, with a long white moustache, pointed ears and sharp teeth.[26] It is also noted later in the novel (Chapter 11 subsection "The Escaped Wolf") by a zookeeper who sees him that he has a hooked nose and a pointed beard with a streak of white in it. He is dressed all in black and has hair on his palms. Harker describes him as an old man, "cruel looking" and giving an effect of "extraordinary pallor".[26]     I saw... Count Dracula... with red light of triumph in his eyes, and with a smile that Judas in hell might be proud of.     — Jonathan Harker's journal, Dracula, Chapter 4 As the novel progresses, Dracula is described as taking on a more and more youthful appearance. After Harker strikes him with a shovel, he is left with a scar on his forehead which he bears throughout the course of the novel. Dracula also possesses great wealth, and has Romani people in his homeland who are loyal to him as servants and protectors. Powers and weaknesses Bela Lugosi as Count Dracula in 1931 Count Dracula is portrayed in the novel using many different supernatural abilities, and is believed to have gained his abilities through dealings with the Devil. Chapter 18 of the novel describes many of the abilities, limitations and weaknesses of vampires and Dracula in particular. Dracula has superhuman strength which, according to Van Helsing, is equivalent to that of 20 strong men. He does not cast a shadow or have a reflection from mirrors. He is immune to conventional means of attack; a sailor tries to stab him in the back with a knife, but the blade goes through his body as though it is air.[27] He can defy gravity to a certain extent and possesses superhuman agility, able to climb vertical surfaces upside down in a reptilian manner. He can travel onto "unhallowed" ground, such as the graves of suicides and those of his victims. He has powerful hypnotic, telepathic and illusionary abilities. He also has the ability to "within limitations" vanish and reappear elsewhere at will. If he knows the path, he can come out from anything or into anything regardless of how close it is bound or even if it is soldered shut.[28] He has amassed cunning and wisdom throughout centuries, and he is unable to die by the mere passing of time alone.[28] He can command animals such as rats, owls, bats, moths, foxes and wolves. However, his control over these animals is limited, as seen when the party first enters his house in London. Although Dracula is able to summon thousands of rats to swarm and attack the group, Holmwood summons his trio of terriers to do battle with the rats. The dogs prove very efficient rat killers, suggesting they are Manchester Terriers trained for that purpose. Terrified by the dogs' onslaught, the rats flee, and any control which Dracula had over them is gone.[29] Dracula can also manipulate the weather and, within his range, is able to direct the elements, such as storms, fog and mist.[28] Shapeshifting Dracula can change form at will, able to grow and become small, his featured forms in the novel being that of a bat, a wolf, a large dog and a fog or mist. When the moonlight is shining, he can travel as elemental dust within its rays. He is able to pass through tiny cracks or crevices while retaining his human form or in the form of a vapour; described by Van Helsing as the ability to slip through a hairbreadth space of a tomb door or coffin. This is also an ability used by his victim Lucy as a vampire. When the party breaks into her tomb, they open the sealed coffin to find her corpse is no longer located within.[30] Vampirism One of Dracula's powers is the ability to turn others into vampires by biting them. According to Van Helsing:     When they become such, there comes with the change the curse of immortality; they cannot die, but must go on age after age adding new victims and multiplying the evils of the world. For all that die from the preying of the Undead become themselves Undead, and prey on their kind. And so the circle goes on ever widening, like as the ripples from a stone thrown in the water. Friend Arthur, if you had met that kiss which you know of before poor Lucy die, or again, last night when you open your arms to her, you would in time, when you had died, have become nosferatu, as they call it in Eastern Europe, and would for all time make more of those Un-Deads that so have filled us with horror.     — Dr. Seward's journal, Dracula, Chapter 16 The vampire bite itself does not cause death. It is the method vampires use to drain blood of the victim and to increase their influence over them. This is described by Van Helsing:     The nosferatu do not die like the bee when he sting once. He is only stronger, and being stronger, have yet more power to work evil.     — Dr. Seward's journal, Dracula, Chapter 18 Victims who are bitten by a vampire and do not die, are hypnotically influenced by them:     Those children whose blood she suck are not yet so much worse; but if she live on, Un-Dead, more and more lose their blood and by her power over them they come to her.     — Mina Harker's journal, Dracula, Chapter 18 Van Helsing later describes the aftermath of a bitten victim when the vampire has been killed:     But if she die in truth, then all cease; the tiny wounds of the throats disappear, and they go back to their plays unknowing of whatever has been.     — Mina Harker's journal, Dracula, Chapter 18 As Dracula slowly drains Lucy's blood, she dies from acute blood loss and later transforms into a vampire, despite the efforts of Seward and Van Helsing to provide her with blood transfusions.[31] He is aided by powers of necromancy and divination of the dead, that all who die by his hand may reanimate and do his bidding.[28] Bloodletting Dracula requires no other sustenance but fresh human blood, which has the effect of rejuvenating him and allowing him to grow younger. His power is drawn from the blood of others, and he cannot survive without it.[28][32] Although drinking blood can rejuvenate his youth and strength, it does not give him the ability to regenerate; months after being struck on the head by a shovel, he still bears a scar from the impact.[33] Dracula's preferred victims are women.[34] Harker states that he believes Dracula has a state of fasting as well as a state of feeding.[35] Dracula does state to Mina, however, that exerting his abilities causes a desire to feed.[36] Vampire's Baptism of Blood Count Dracula is depicted as the "King Vampire", and can control other vampires. To punish Mina and the party for their efforts against him, Dracula bites her on at least three occasions. He also forces her to drink his blood; this act curses her with the effects of vampirism and gives him a telepathic link to her thoughts.[37] However, hypnotism was only able to be done before dawn.[38] Van Helsing refers to the act of drinking blood by both the vampire and the victim "the Vampire's Baptism of Blood".[39]     you, their best beloved one, are now to me, flesh of my flesh, blood of my blood, kin of my kin, my bountiful wine-press for a while, and shall be later on my companion and my helper. You shall be avenged in turn, for not one of them but shall minister to your needs. But as yet you are to be punished for what you have done. You have aided in thwarting me. Now you shall come to my call. When my brain says 'Come!’ to you, you shall cross land or sea to do my bidding.[40] The effects changes Mina physically and mentally over time. A few moments after Dracula attacks her, Van Helsing takes a wafer of sacramental bread and places it on her forehead to bless her; when the bread touches her skin, it burns her and leaves a scar on her forehead. Her teeth start growing longer but do not grow sharper. She begins to lose her appetite, feeling repulsed by normal food,[41] begins to sleep more and more during the day; cannot wake unless at sunset and stops writing in her diary. When Van Helsing later crumbles the same bread in a circle around her, she is unable to cross or leave the circle, discovering a new form of protection.[42] Dracula's death can release the curse on any living victim of eventual transformation into vampire. However, Van Helsing reveals that were he to escape, his continued existence would ensure that even if he did not victimize Mina further, she would transform into a vampire upon her eventual natural death. Limitations of his powers Dracula is much less powerful in daylight and is only able to shift his form at dawn, noon, and dusk (he can shift his form freely at night or if he is at his grave). The sun is not fatal to him, as sunlight does not burn and destroy him upon contact, though most of his abilities cease.     The sun that rose on our sorrow this morning guards us in its course. Until it sets to-night, that monster must retain whatever form he now has. He is confined within the limitations of his earthly envelope. He cannot melt into thin air nor disappear through cracks or chinks or crannies. If he go through a doorway, he must open the door like a mortal.     — Jonathan Harker's journal, Dracula, Chapter 22     His power ceases, as does that all of all evil things, at the coming of the day. Only at certain times can he have limited freedom. If he be not at the place whither he is bound, he can only change himself at noon or exact sunrise or sunset.     — Mina Harker's journal, Dracula, Chapter 18 Later interpretations of the character, and vampires in general, would amplify this trait into an outright fatal weakness, making it so that even the first rays of sunrise are capable of reducing a vampire to ash.[citation needed] He is also limited in his ability to travel, as he can only cross running water at low or high tide. Owing to this, he is unable to fly across a river in the form of a bat or mist or even by himself board a boat or step off a boat onto a dock unless he is physically carried over with assistance. He is also unable to enter a place unless invited to do so by someone of the household, even a visitor; once invited, he can enter and leave the premises at will.[28] Weaknesses Thirst Dracula is commonly depicted with a bloodlust which he is seemingly unable to control. Adaptations sometimes call this uncontrollable state 'the thirst'. Religious symbolism There are items which afflict him to the point he has no power and can even calm him from his insatiable appetite for blood. He is repulsed by garlic, as well as sacred items and symbols such as crucifixes, and sacramental bread.     at the instant I saw that the cut had bled a little, and the blood was trickling over my chin. I laid down the razor, turning as I did so half round to look for some sticking plaster. When the Count saw my face, his eyes blazed with a sort of demoniac fury, and he suddenly made a grab at my throat. I drew away and his hand touched the string of beads which held the crucifix. It made an instant change in him, for the fury passed so quickly that I could hardly believe that it was ever there.     — Jonathan Harker's journal, Dracula, Chapter 2 Placing the branch of a wild rose upon the top of his coffin will render him unable to escape it; a sacred bullet fired into the coffin could kill him so that he remain true-dead.[28] Mountain Ash is also described as a form of protection from a vampire although the effects are unknown.[43] This was believed to be used as protection against evil spirits and witches during the Victorian era. Death-sleep The state of rest to which vampires are prone during the day is described in the novel as a deathlike sleep in which the vampire sleeps open-eyed, is unable to awaken or move, and also may be unaware of any presence of individuals who may be trespassing. Dracula is portrayed as being active in daylight at least once to pursue a victim. Dracula also purchases many properties throughout London 'over the counter' which shows that he does have the ability to have some type of presence in daylight.     on a pile of newly dug earth, lay the Count! He was either dead or asleep. I could not say which, for eyes were open and stony, but without the glassiness of death, and the cheeks had the warmth of life through all their pallor. The lips were as red as ever. But there was no sign of movement, no pulse, no breath, no beating of the heart. I bent over him, and tried to find any sign of life, but in vain... I thought he might have the keys on him, but when I went to search I saw the dead eyes, and in them dead though they were, such a look of hate, though unconscious of me or my presence, that I fled from the place, and leaving the Count's room by the window.[44] He requires Transylvanian soil to be nearby to him in a foreign land or to be entombed within his coffin within Transylvania in order to successfully rest; otherwise, he will be unable to recover his strength. This has forced him to transport many boxes of Transylvanian earth to each of his residences in London. He is most powerful when he is within his Earth-Home, Coffin-Home, Hell-Home, or any place unhallowed.[28][45] Further, if Dracula or any vampire has had their fill in blood upon feeding, they will be caused to rest in this dead state even longer than usual.[46] Other abilities While universally feared by the local people of Transylvania and even beyond, Dracula commands the loyalty of Gypsies and a band of Slovaks who transport his boxes on their way to London and to serve as an armed convoy bringing his coffin back to his castle. The Slovaks and Gypsies appear to know his true nature, for they laugh at Harker when he tries to communicate his plight, and betray Harker's attempt to send a letter through them by giving it to the Count. Dracula seems to be able to hold influence over people with mental disorders, such as Renfield, who is never bitten but who worships Dracula, referring to him over the course of the novel as "Master" and "Lord". Dracula also afflicts Lucy with chronic sleepwalking, putting her into a trance-like state that allows them not only to submit to his will but also seek him and satisfy his need to feed. Dracula's powers and weaknesses vary greatly in the many adaptations. Previous and subsequent vampires from different legends have had similar vampire characteristics. Character development subsequent to the novel Main article: Count Dracula in popular culture Max Schreck as Count Orlok, the first confirmed cinematic representation of Dracula (in Nosferatu, 1922) Christopher Lee starred as Dracula in numerous British horror films produced by Hammer Films. Shown here is the 1958 film Dracula. Lee fixed the image of the vampire bearing dual elongated fangs in popular culture.[47][48] Dracula has been portrayed by more actors in more visual media adaptations of the novel than any other horror character.[49] Actors who have played him include Max Schreck, Bela Lugosi, John Carradine, Lon Chaney Jr., Christopher Lee, Francis Lederer, Denholm Elliott, Jack Palance, Louis Jourdan, Rudolf Martin, Frank Langella, Klaus Kinski, Gary Oldman, Leslie Nielsen, George Hamilton, David Niven, Charles Macaulay, Keith-Lee Castle, Gerard Butler, Duncan Regehr, Richard Roxburgh, Marc Warren, Rutger Hauer, Stephen Billington, Thomas Kretschmann, Dominic Purcell, Luke Evans and Claes Bang. In 2003, Count Dracula, as portrayed by Lugosi in the 1931 film, was named as the 33rd greatest movie villain by the AFI.[50] In 2013, Empire magazine ranked Lee's portrayal as Dracula the 7th Greatest Horror Movie Character of All Time.[51] The character is closely associated with the western cultural archetype of the vampire, and remains a popular Halloween costume.     Count Dracula appears in Mad Monster Party? voiced by Allen Swift. This version is shown to be wearing a monocle. Count Dracula is among the monsters that Baron Boris von Frankenstein invites to the Isle of Evil to show off the secret of total destruction and announce his retirement from the Worldwide Organization of Monsters.     Sesame Street character Count von Count is based on Bela Lugosi's interpretation of Count Dracula and Jack Davis' design for Dracula from Mad Monster Party?.     Count Dracula appears in Mad Mad Mad Monsters (a "prequel of sorts" to Mad Monster Party?) voiced again by Allen Swift. He and his son are invited by Baron Henry von Frankenstein to attend the wedding of Frankenstein's monster and its mate at the Transylvania Astoria Hotel.     Dracula is the primary antagonist of the Castlevania video game series, the first two seasons of the Castlevania Netflix series, and the main protagonist of the Lords of Shadow reboot series.     Count Dracula appears in the Attack of the Killer Tomatoes episode "Spatula, Prinze of Dorkness", voiced by S. Scott Bullock. He relates a tale of how he once gave Dr. Putrid T. Gangreen a serum to transform tomatoes into vampire tomatoes. Though the Doctor refused, Zoltan overheard their conversation and, mistaking the word serum for syrup, ingests the serum himself and renaming himself "Spatula, Prinze of Dorkness" who can turn people into vampires by kissing them in the neck (a stipulation that the Censor Lady put into place in fear of showing the biting and bloodshed associated with vampires on a Saturday morning cartoon). This spread to the other tomatoes and the entire town. When the sun came up and disabled the vampires, Count Dracula in sunblock appears and deemed that the town is not worthy to be vampires. He then gives Chad Finletter the antidote to the vampirism and advises that the tomatoes be squashed immediately.     Dracula appears as the lead character of Dracula the Un-dead, a novel by Stoker's great-grand nephew Dacre presented as a sequel to the original.     In the Supernatural episode "Monster Monster", a shapeshifter that Sam and Dean Winchester fight considers his form of Count Dracula (portrayed by Todd Stashwick) his favourite form. It is in this form that Jamie killed him with Sam's gun loaded with silver bullets.     Count Dracula is the main character of the Hotel Transylvania franchise, voiced by Adam Sandler in the first three movies and by Brian Hull in the fourth movie.     Dracula, going by an inversion of his name, "Alucard," serves as the main character of the anime and manga series Hellsing and Hellsing Ultimate where he serves Integra Hellsing, Abraham's great-granddaughter, as an anti-vampire warrior devoted to the British Crown.     Dracula is the primary antagonist of the Showtime series Penny Dreadful, portrayed by Christian Camargo. This version of the character is the brother of Lucifer and, thus, a fallen angel. Modern and postmodern analyses of the character Portrait of Vlad III Dracula (c. 1560), reputedly a copy of an original made during his lifetime Already in 1958, Cecil Kirtly proposed that Count Dracula shared his personal past with the historical Transylvanian-born Voivode Vlad III Dracula of Wallachia, also known as Vlad the Impaler or Vlad Țepeș. Following the publication of In Search of Dracula by Radu Florescu and Raymond McNally in 1972, this supposed connection attracted much popular attention. This work argued that Bram Stoker based his Dracula on Vlad the Impaler.[52] Historically, the name "Dracula" is the family name of Vlad Țepeș' family, a name derived from a fraternal order of knights called the Order of the Dragon, founded by Sigismund of Luxembourg (king of Hungary and Bohemia, and Holy Roman Emperor) to uphold Christianity and defend the Empire against the Ottoman Turks. Vlad II Dracul, father of Vlad III, was admitted to the order around 1431 because of his bravery in fighting the Turks and was dubbed Dracul (dragon or devil) thus his son became Dracula (son of the dragon). From 1431 onward, Vlad II wore the emblem of the order and later, as ruler of Wallachia, his coinage bore the dragon symbol.[53] Shakespearean actor and friend of Stoker's Sir Henry Irving is widely considered to be a real-life inspiration for the character of Dracula. Stoker came across the name Dracula in his reading on Romanian history, and chose this to replace the name (Count Wampyr) that he had originally intended to use for his villain. However, some Dracula scholars, led by Elizabeth Miller, have questioned the depth of this connection as early as 1998. They argue that Stoker in fact knew little of the historic Vlad III, Vlad the Impaler, and that he used only the name "Dracula" and some miscellaneous scraps of Romanian history.[54] Also, there are no comments about Vlad III in the author's working notes.[55] While having a conversation with Jonathan Harker in Chapter 3, Dracula refers to his own background, and these speeches show elements which Stoker directly copied from An Account of the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia: With Various Political Observations Relating to Them by William Wilkinson.[56] Stoker mentions the Voivode of the Dracula race who fought against the Turks after the defeat in the Battle of Kosovo, and was later betrayed by his brother, historical facts which unequivocally point to Vlad III, described as "Voïvode Dracula" by Wilkinson:     Who was it but one of my own race who as Voivode crossed the Danube and beat the Turk on his own ground? This was a Dracula indeed! Woe was it that his own unworthy brother, when he had fallen, sold his people to the Turk and brought the shame of slavery on them! Was it not this Dracula, indeed, who inspired that other of his race who in a later age again and again brought his forces over the great river into Turkey-land; who, when he was beaten back, came again, and again, though he had to come alone from the bloody field where his troops were being slaughtered, since he knew that he alone could ultimately triumph! (Chapter 3, pp. 19) The Count's intended identity is later commented by Professor Van Helsing, referring to a letter from his friend Arminius:     He must, indeed, have been that Voivode Dracula who won his name against the Turk, over the great river on the very frontier of Turkey-land. (Chapter 18, pp. 145) This indeed encourages the reader to identify the Count with the Voivode Dracula first mentioned by him in Chapter 3, the one betrayed by his brother: Vlad III Dracula, betrayed by his brother Radu the Handsome, who had chosen the side of the Turks. But as noted by the Dutch author Hans Corneel de Roos, in Chapter 25, Van Helsing and Mina drop this rudimentary connection to Vlad III and instead describe the Count's personal past as that of "that other of his race" who lived "in a later age". By smoothly exchanging Vlad III for a nameless double, Stoker avoided his main character being unambiguously linked to a historical person traceable in any history book. Similarly, the novelist did not want to disclose the precise site of the Count's residence, Castle Dracula. As confirmed by Stoker's own handwritten research notes, the novelist had a specific location for the Castle in mind while writing the narrative: an empty mountain top in the Transylvanian Kelemen alps near the former border with Moldavia.[57] Efforts to promote the Poenari Castle (ca. 200 km away from the novel's place of action near the Borgo Pass) as the "real Castle Dracula" have no basis in Stoker's writing; although it bears much similarity to the fictional Castle Dracula, no written evidence shows Stoker to have heard of it. Regarding the Bran Castle near Brașov, Stoker possibly saw an illustration of Castle Bran (Törzburg) in Charles Boner's 1865 book on Transylvania, Transylvania: Its Products and Its People.[58][59] Although Stoker may have been inspired by its romantic appearance, neither Boner, nor Mazuchelli nor Crosse (who also mention Terzburg or Törzburg) associate it with Vlad III; for the site of his fictitious Castle Dracula, Stoker preferred an empty mountain top. Furthermore, Stoker's detailed notes reveal that the novelist was very well aware of the ethnic and geo-political differences between the "Roumanians" or "Wallachs"/"Wallachians", descendants of the Dacians, and the Székelys or Szeklers, allies of the Magyars or Hungarians, whose interests were opposed to that of the Wallachians. In the novel's original typewritten manuscript, the Count speaks of throwing off the "Austrian yoke", which corresponds to the Szekler political point of view. This expression is crossed out, however, and replaced by "Hungarian yoke" (as appearing in the printed version), which matches the historical perspective of the Wallachians. This has been interpreted by some to mean that Stoker opted for the Wallachian, not the Szekler interpretation, thus lending more consistency to the Romanian identity of his Count: although not identical with Vlad III, the Vampire is portrayed as one of the "Dracula race".[60] However, despite this, Stoker chose the Count to have revealed himself to be a Székely, and not a Wallachian nobleman (the region where the real "Draculas" ruled over). Screen portrayals Year     Title     Actor playing Dracula     Notes 1921     Dracula's Death     Erik Vanko     Lost film 1922     Nosferatu     Max Schreck     Renamed Count Orlok for legal reasons 1931     Dracula     Bela Lugosi     Drácula     Carlos Villarías     Spanish version using the same sets as the Lugosi version, but with a different cast and crew. 1943     Son of Dracula     Lon Chaney Jr.     1944     House of Frankenstein     John Carradine     1945     House of Dracula     1948     Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein     Bela Lugosi     1953     Drakula İstanbul'da     Atıf Kaptan     1958     Dracula     Christopher Lee     The Return of Dracula     Francis Lederer     1964     Batman Dracula     Jack Smith     1966     Dracula: Prince of Darkness     Christopher Lee     Billy the Kid vs Dracula     John Carradine     1967     Mad Monster Party?     Allen Swift     Animated film Blood of Dracula's Castle     Alexander D'Arcy     1968     Dracula Has Risen from the Grave     Christopher Lee     Dracula     Denholm Elliott     Episode of UK TV series Mystery and Imagination 1969     Las vampiras     John Carradine     The Magic Christian     Christopher Lee     1970     Count Dracula     Taste the Blood of Dracula     One More Time     Scars of Dracula     Cuadecuc, vampir     Jonathan     Paul Albert Krumm     1971     Dracula vs. Frankenstein     Zandor Vorkov     Night Gallery     Francis Lederer     Episode: "The Devil Is Not Mocked" 1972     Blacula     Charles Macaulay     Mad Mad Mad Monsters     Allen Swift     Animated film Dracula A.D. 1972     Christopher Lee     Count Dracula's Great Love     Paul Naschy     1973     Scream Blacula Scream     Charles Macaulay     The Satanic Rites of Dracula     Christopher Lee     Bram Stoker's Dracula     Jack Palance     Television film 1974     Blood for Dracula     Udo Kier     Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires     John Forbes-Robertson     Vampira     David Niven     Released in US as Old Dracula 1975     Lady Dracula     Stephen Boyd     Germany (theatrically released in 1977) 1976     Dracula and Son     Christopher Lee     1977     Dracula's Dog     Michael Pataki     Count Dracula     Louis Jourdan     Television film 1978     Doctor Dracula     John Carradine     1979     Nosferatu the Vampyre     Klaus Kinski     Remake of Nosferatu (1922) with the novel's character names restored. Cliffhangers     Michael Nouri     Episode: "The Curse of Dracula" Love at First Bite     George Hamilton     Nocturna     John Carradine     Dracula     Frank Langella     The Halloween That Almost Wasn't     Judd Hirsch     Television film 1985     Fracchia Vs. Dracula     Edmund Purdom     1987     The Monster Squad     Duncan Regehr     1988     Waxwork     Miles O'Keeffe     Scooby-Doo and the Ghoul School     Zale Kessler     Animated film Scooby-Doo! and the Reluctant Werewolf     Hamilton Camp     Animated film 1989     The Super Mario Bros. Super Show     Jim Ward     Episode: "Bats in the Basement" Captain N: The Game Master     Garry Chalk     Animated TV series Superboy     Lloyd Bochner     Episode: "Young Dracula" 1990     Attack of the Killer Tomatoes     S. Scott Bullock     Episode: "Spatula, Prinze of Dorkness" 1990–1991     Dracula: The Series     Geordie Johnson     TV series 1992     Bram Stoker's Dracula     Gary Oldman     1993     The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles     Bob Peck     Episode: "Transylvania, January 1918" U.F.O.     Antony Georghiou     1994     Monster Force     Robert Bockstael     1995     Monster Mash     Anthony Crivello     Dracula: Dead and Loving It     Leslie Nielsen     1997     The Creeps     Phil Fondacaro     2000     Dracula 2000     Gerard Butler     Buffy the Vampire Slayer     Rudolf Martin     Episode: "Buffy vs. Dracula" Dark Prince: The True Story of Dracula     Rudolf Martin     Television film 2001     Dracula, the Musical     Tom Hewitt     2002     Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary     Zhang Wei-Qiang     Dracula     Patrick Bergin     2003     Dracula II: Ascension     Stephen Billington     2004     Van Helsing     Richard Roxburgh     Blade: Trinity     Dominic Purcell     Dracula 3000     Langley Kirkwood     2005     Dracula     Wins Dieus     Indian Malayalam-language television series on Asianet. The Batman vs. Dracula     Peter Stormare     Animated film Dracula III: Legacy     Rutger Hauer     2005–2008     The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy     Phil LaMarr     Animated TV series 2006     Dracula     Marc Warren     Television film 2006–2014     Young Dracula     Keith-Lee Castle     TV series 2008     Dracula     Wins Dieus     Indian Telugu-language television series on Gemini TV. Supernatural     Todd Stashwick     Episode: "Monster Movie" The Librarian: Curse of the Judas Chalice     Bruce Davison     2009     House of the Wolf Man     Michael R. Thomas     2012     Family Guy     Seth MacFarlane     Episode: "Livin' on a Prayer" Dracula 3D     Thomas Kretschmann     Hotel Transylvania     Adam Sandler     Animated film Dracula Reborn     Stuart Rigby     Television film 2013     Dracula     Jonathan Rhys Meyers     TV series Dracula 2012     Sudheer Sukumaran     Indian horror film Dear Dracula     Ray Liotta     Animated film Dracula: The Dark Prince     Luke Roberts     2014     Dracula Untold     Luke Evans     2015     Hotel Transylvania 2     Adam Sandler     Animated film 2016     Penny Dreadful     Christian Camargo     TV series Welcome To Monster High     Michael Sorich     Animated film 2017     Monster High: Electrified     Michael Sorich     Animated film 2017–present     Hotel Transylvania     David Berni     Animated TV series Castlevania     Graham McTavish     Animated TV series Monster High: The Adventures of the Ghoul Squad     Michael Sorich     Animated TV series 2017     Monster Family     Jason Isaacs     Animated film 2018     Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation     Adam Sandler     Animated film 2019     Van Helsing     Tricia Helfer     TV series 2020     Dracula     Claes Bang     TV miniseries Dracula Sir     Anirban Bhattacharya     Indian Bengali-language film loosely based on the legend of the Dracula. 2021     Monster Pets     Brian Hull     Replacing Adam Sandler. 2022     Hotel Transylvania: Transformania 2023     The Last Voyage of the Demeter     Javier Botet     2023     Renfield     Nicolas Cage" (wikipedia.orG)
  • Condition: New other (see details)
  • Condition: New old stock; sealed but acquired some storage wear. Please see photos and description.
  • Shape: Circle
  • Occasion: Halloween
  • Size: Medium
  • Color: Black
  • Material: Cardboard, Paperboard
  • Year Manufactured: 1991
  • Subject: Skeletons & Skulls
  • Brand: Amscan
  • Type: Paper Plates
  • Era: Late 20th Century (1970-1999)
  • Packaging: Shrink Wrap
  • Theme: Fantasy, Mystical, Novelty, Seasonal
  • Collection: Mr. Bones
  • Style: Arts & Crafts Movement
  • Original/Reproduction: Original
  • Features: Retired, Halloween-themed
  • Time Period Manufactured: 1990-1999
  • Country/Region of Manufacture: United States
  • Finish: Semi-Gloss

PicClick Insights - 1991 VAMPIRE SKELETON PARTY PLATES Amscan Halloween decor Mr Bones vintage rare PicClick Exclusive

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