Project Haunted House Presents: How to Find and Kill a Vampire — Return to Home

Vampire: Vampyr ill artlibre journal. Legend is that the vampire would not pay for the drawing because he did not like the artist's rendering.

These instructions will assist you in your quest to both find and kill this particular blood-sucking member of the undead family. If, of course, you would rather just kill a vampire (assuming you'd rather not find one, or that one has, instead, found you), feel free to ignore the first set of instructions regarding how to find our fangy friends. Essentially, the task at hand can be boiled down into three apparently simple steps: Arm yourself with the proper implements Find the vampire in one of the likely hangouts Kill the vampire Unfortunately, dealing with the undead isn't really an intuitive chore for most of us, so we here at Project Haunted House have taken it upon ourselves to provide clear (if lengthy) instructions for how to do each of these steps.

Links of note: Return to Home Index O' Beastdom and Badness Index O' Filmic Archives Index O' Generally Useful Tools Index O' Haunted Hot Spots Index O' Literary Lore Font of Knowledge Pending Guides Special Thanks Suggestions & Such Glossary of Terms

1) Arm Yourself — What You Will Need:
These are tools and items that will make your task much easier to accomplish and will increase your chances of success. This guide highly recommends neither attempting to find nor to kill a vampire without some combination of the implements in the following table (for quick consultation):

Item	How to Use It	Where to Find It	Lethal/Not	What It Looks Like	Notes
Holy water	Douse vampire	Local religious supplies store	Lethal		Buy in bulk
Wooden stake(s)	Jab, poke, stab, impale, etc etc	Lumber yard, forest, trees in general	Lethal		Cedar is preferable
Fire	Incinerate vampire	Lighter: gas station, grocery store, smoker's outlet; matches also work well, in a pinch.	Lethal		Don't catch self on fire; Zippo© is a fine brand.
Knife/axe/hatchet	Decapitation	Hardware store	Lethal		Keep it clean and sharp
Rice or small seeds	Distraction	Grocery store, plant nursery	Not		Buys time
Cloves of garlic	Prevention	Grocery store	Not		Preventive measure only

Each item's purpose, proper usage, and other notes are expanded below:

• Holy water: you should be able to find this at your local religious supplies store. If you can, buy in bulk — we will be optimistic and assume that you will be around to need more than one bottle, for the next vampire or undead beastie that comes your way.
• Wooden stakes:cedar is generally the preferred wood to use, although in a pinch, pretty much any type of wood will do. The stake should be roughly an inch in diameter, at the bare minimum; anything thinner may not do the job. This is for jabbing and poking and stabbing, so the point should be fairly sharp. The length should be roughly twice the width of your hand to provide enough space in which to get a decent grip hastily. You can use wood from your local lumber or home improvement store, although tree branches (assuming there's a wooded area somewhere in your general vicinity) may prove easier to fashion into stakes.
• A source of fire:generally burning the corpse will also do the trick quite nicely, if you're able to do so. We suggest a lighter, which you can pick up at your local gas station/grocery store/smoker's outlet, etc.
• A sharp and sturdy blade: a good quality knife or hatchet should work fine, although an ax of some sort is ideal. You absolutely want the blade to be sharp and fairly long (no shorter than 4 inches) because you'll be using it to decapitate this beastie. Again, check at your local home improvement or hardware store for a selection of suitable tools.
• A bag of rice or small seeds:legend has it that if a vampire comes across a spilled bag of rice or poppy seeds, s/he will be compelled to count all of the spilled items, which will buy you some time and serve as a distraction for your slightly obsessive-compulsive enemy. Rice you can find at the grocery store with the garlic; you can probably find poppy seeds there, too, and if not, try a garden supplies store or a local (plant) nursery.
• Cloves of garlic:these you can get at your local grocery store; as above with the holy water, buying in bulk is wise. Garlic is more a preventive measure than an actual weapon, but it's nice to have.

2) Finding the Vampire — How To

At this point, we will assume you have acquired one or more of the above-mentioned items. Excellent! Now you are prepared for the next step: finding the vampire(s). If, as mentioned earlier, you do not wish to seek out a vampire OR if a vampire has already found you and you are using this guide only to find out how to kill a vampire, you can skip this section.

A few good places to start looking (or to avoid, but if you wanted to avoid vampires you wouldn't be reading this part, now would you):

• Cemeteries — obvious but true. The undead are often mistaken for truly dead and are therefore quite frequently buried (as though the stubborn fools won't dig up and out of their graves anyway). Most towns have at least one cemetery or graveyard; these are probably the best places to start.
• Dark alleys and dead-ends — the shadows are a good place for vampires to hide, usually in the not-so-nice neighborhoods or around bars, since these places are more likely to provide unwary foot traffic and poor lighting.
• Abandoned buildings — boarded-up windows mean that sunlight (a fantastic weapon but not listed above as it's difficult to find a bottle of sunlight on the open market) isn't a threat, and generally the "abandoned" bit means less chance of discovery for the vampire.

3) Killing the Vampire — How To

Most of the items listed above will accomplish your goal, assuming that you now have, at this point, a vampire in your presence whom you'd like to demolish as quickly as possible without becoming demolished yourself (congratulations, by the way, on making it this far — if you can still read this, that means you're still alive AND that you still care enough to finish the job and aren't running off madly to parts unknown).

At this point, you probably have all the information you need to complete your task, but we'd like to clear up any confusion. Here are just a few pointers on how to use the tools we've described:

• Holy water — usually dousing your vampire fairly thoroughly (i.e., just sprinkling a little bit won't do) should work. There's also the alternative of forcing your vampire to drink the holy water, though this is usually a trickier thing to accomplish and we'll get to that later on in another chapter. Right now you just need to focus on staying alive and killing the vampire.
• Wooden stake — legend usually focuses on stabbing your wooden stake into the vampire's heart, although Roma vampire beliefs include stabbing a hawthorn stake through the vampire's legs. We suggest aiming for the heart, and if that doesn't work, then aim for the legs. Keep in mind: it may not be easy to stab directly through the heart at first; you might hit other organs or the lungs instead. Don't lose hope; you'll get it if you keep trying. And in all but rare cases of Kartageners syndrome, the heart's on the left (vampire's left, not yours). Also: in order to stake the vampire, you need to get fairly close to it, so watch your step — you may not want to use this method if you're prone to freezing up when you're nervous.
• Fire — if you can catch the vampire's clothing or hair on fire, that's usually enough to catch the rest of them on fire and poof! Your vamp's dead. You could, of course, use an accelerant like gasoline or kerosene, if you have it handy. You'll probably want to stick around at a safe distance to make sure that you've really killed your bad guy and that he doesn't wander off and put himself out. Note: the goal is to kill the vampire, not yourself, so please be careful when using accelerants that you don't set yourself on fire as well.
• The knife/hatchet/ax — much like the stake, you'll need to get fairly close to the vampire to use a knife, which might mean you'll want to use a hatchet or an ax instead. It's also sometimes easier to hack than to saw (as you would need to do with a knife, preferably one with a serrated blade), and the length of the ax- or hatchet-handle would give you a bit more room to move. Note: if the blade isn't sharp, you may be hacking for awhile, so take care of your ax/hatchet/knife — clean it after use and sharpen it when it appears to not slice as cleanly as it usually does.

The cloves and seeds/rice will not kill the vampire, so they are not listed here — they are preventive measures only, similar to slicing the hamstrings on a suspected vampire when burying the body to prevent them from rising from the grave.

If you have successfully performed all three steps, your vampire should finally be really dead. Some legends state that the corpse will disappear into ashes; others don't mention any sort of visual cue for death, so if your vampire seems to be dead but hasn't poofed into dust, we suggest dousing them with an accelerant and lighting them on fire, which will, in time, reduce them to ash and all will be well with the world.

At this point, you know all you need to know to find and kill a vampire, and the most useful common tools to do so. The rest will come with experience, and since you've read this guide, you do have some hope of sticking around to gain experience, so kudos for you! Feel free to consult the Glossary of Terms to cross-reference other uses for the above-mentioned items, and if you have any further questions or comments, contact the site maintainer at meghan[dot]armes[at]gmail[dot]com.
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Questions, comments, criticism, praise — make a suggestion or contact the author at: meghan[dot]armes[at]gmail[dot]com.