Let me preface that I do believe vampires existed... but, as a rational being (or so I like to think), I cannot believe in those traits deemed vampiric by pulp-fiction novelists and/or Hollywood screenwriters. Unfortunately here, I am almost a minority of one.
To decide whether to believe or not, one must first determine what is believable based on the facts... not fictions.
So far here, all I have found almost without exception is a die-hard adherence to the obvious fictions of Hollywood and pulp-fiction novels, or... perhaps more disturbing, the self-created fictions devoid of any historical evidence of those attempting to identify themselves as vampires based upon such fictions.
The original Slavic accounts (yes, the vampire is and always was a Slavic creature despite the many world myths of ghosties and goblins who might possess a trait or two that could be obliquely construed as "vampiric") do not mention blood drinking (this was only added to the belief after corpses were dug up believed to be vampires -- following the discovery of the activity for which the vampire true was known -- and found full of decomposition liquids resembling blood), do not mention fangs or a fear of daylight or crucifixes, nor many other later fictions created to sell dime novels in the 18th and 19th Centuries. Hell, they weren't even believed to be immortal, back then. And there has never been a Slavic belief in vampires as psy-energy feeders. Nor can I find any such in any later depiction, either.
And yet, so ironically, these patently fictitious traits are what almost everyone here considers the bedrock truth of what the vampire was or, more unbelievably still, claims to possess, themselves.
Do I believe? I do only in what can be evidenced or otherwise established by the historical facts to which Reason can then be applied.
After all, to use your analogy of belief in a "million dollars," I don't have to see it to believe in it because of the preponderance of evidence that proves it. After all, there are more than 5 million people living in my city alone... and it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that if each of those 5 million people possessed only a quarter ($.25) to their name, this would easily total over a million dollars. Thus, by simple logic based on the evidence: a million dollars must exist, where I have laid eyes on it or not.
This is how the rational mind was intended to figure things out: by Reason based on the evidences.
Yet for so many here, the most foundationless of fictions are believed wholeheartedly while the extant facts and evidences of history are not researched, not discussed, and not considered. Instead, when pointed out (as I have here) they are disregarded as unimportant or at least of no more importance than the admitted fictions that came later. (And entries hereafter in response to this one will most likely bear that out... as they have in the past.)
Now there's a fact I wish weren't true. ;)
