Very little to offer here so I've combined three categories on one page. As with elves and werewolves, many other legends are influenced by the activities of anachronistic or genetically unusual people. Not all of the extreme ones are safely hidden away in mental hospitals.

Ogres

I was walking past a small apartment house in North Las Vegas in Fall of 2005 when I first saw her alone in the parking area to the left of the building. Big, muscular, obese. Walking slowly around raging and bellowing into thin air as if to condemn and challenge all life on earth outside of herself. Her expression blunt, stupid, emotionally vacant. Her dead eyes and demeanor filled with a level of low self importance possible only in someone of supernatural moral inferiority.

Some weeks later I saw her again in downtown Las Vegas bellowing at three children as she made threatening lunges at them. A woman with two little kids ran off to call the police and I went about my business.

Trolls

The first was a chap I worked with on a house restoration years ago. One day a very annoying, fellow managed a very deep insult against him. He calmly replied to it, referring to the man's three year old son, "You know, Bill, when you talk that way it makes me want to hurt your boy. But I'm not going to do that, Bill. You know why? Because it wouldn't be fair to the boy, Bill. It wouldn't be fair to the boy!

Alone later he told me that he often thought that it would be a fine thing to drown the children of really evil people, but he would never do it because the children might grow up to be good in spite of their parents. I agreed that they very well might, and suggested that he might be better off not to discuss such feelings so openly.

The other troll candidate is a paranoid schizophrenic hippie of my acquaintance who twists leafy vines into his long stringy hair to give himself a "medieval forest-like" appearance.

Vampires

I knew a chap at Northeastern University who craved blood all the time. He experienced tightness in his temples and jaw, head pain, especially behind the eyes, and a terrible thirst. He said that the only relief came from blood. He had blood pudding for breakfast, blood sausage for lunch, rare meat au juice for dinner. He had a local butcher save blood for him which he used to make bullion which he drank at intervals all day.

This reminds me of how weasels kill several chickens to get the first gush from their throats. Also I think of iron deficiency and the "vitality hunger" mentioned by Dionne Fortune in her book about real vampirism.

June 24 2006

3:08 PM