TRANSILL, AL – Everyone in these parts knew that Vladdy-Joe Crump made moonshine in a cave below Dexter Mountain. And they knew he was a little strange. They all knew he was vampire!”
“But everyone thought that was over. That Vladdy-Joe was in hiding – permanently. But it looks like he has returned!” said Transill Mayor, Leroy Clemmons.
“A couple months back we started getting reports again of folks with puncture wounds on ’em. “Mayor Clemmons recalled. “Doc Evans said they was fang marks and we figured rattlers was the culprits. We have a few snake-handlin’ churches down in the valley and every once in a while someone would get chomped. We didn’t pay it much nevermind.”
But when the bites appeared on Baptists and members of the Assemblies of God, folks began getting worried all over again.
“My daughter, Sadie Lou, came home with what I thought was a hickey, which was troublin’ enough,” said Rodney Sapp. “But she also had a blank stare that was even worse than usual. And where her momma kissed her goodnight, she seen two little holes on her neck. I said ‘Boy howdy, woman — I seen enough horror movie to know them’s the marks of a vampire!”
“YEP, IT’S A VAMPIRE!”
Dr. Evans confirmed that the fang marks were too far apart to have been caused by a serpent.
“I knew something was sorely amiss,” the sixty-year-old town physician told Weekly World News. “Patients were asking for evening hours, then coming into my office walking like zombies. They were pale and severely anemic — and the only abnormalities I could find were the bite marks. I consulted with our local dentist, who noted that wounds had marks of incisors, molars, and one wisdom tooth.
“We knew were dealin; with a human — but a human with fangs! We’ve seen this before down here. We knew right away that them vampires where back!”
Word quickly spread and everyone was under suspicion. Each odd mannerism was noticed.
“Odd beyond the usual unusualness,” Dr. Eveans noted.
Houses of suspects were staked out, literally. Prayer meets were held. But the number of people entering churches dwindled as the number of people who said they had something else to do continued to mount. Suspicion soon became paranoia.
“One guy punched ol’ Charlie Crane right between the eyes and drug him down to the jail,” related Mayor Clemmons. “He said Charlie was fixin’ to bite the neck of a purely little gal. I told him that was plain foolishness ’cause Charlie ain’t got a tooth in his head. Turns out he was just wobbly due to too much moonshine and fell against his cousin Mary.”
WHO ARE THE VICTIMS?
The victims were mainly women, but a few. young men also fell prey to the blood-sucking monster.
“If there was a silver cloud, it was that with each new attack additional clues surfaced,” said Dr. Evans. “An analysis of the neck wounds revealed trances of chewing tobacco. And race car and bass fishing magazines were found at the scene of several assaults. The conclusion was inescapable:
“Them redneck vampires were back.”
As more and more people were eliminated — by staking, not by careful detective work — and alibis were checked out, the list was narrowed to Vladdy-Joe Crump who lived in a tarpaper shack on the edge of town. Neighbors realized that they hadn’t seen Vladdy-Joe in the daylight for quite some time.
VLADDY-JOE SIGHTINGS!
“Some raccoon hunters seen him in the woods around midnight a couple times, but they didn’t think it was odd. They figured he may have been doin’ a moonlight check on his old plywood still. But we decided to stop at his place one morning for a look-see.
“We were surprised to see his windows was boarded up, but we got a bigger shock when we walked in. There he was, layin’ in a wooden box of some kind — made of plywood! He’d actually took apart his still to make it! He raised up and kinda hissed at us. Made the hair standup on my neck, I ain’t embarrassed to say. We asked what in tarnation was going on and he said he’d just got to sleep and told us to get out.
“Well, somethin’ definitely didn’t seem right so a couple of the boys slapped cuffs on him and we threw him in a cell while we continued the investigation.”
A WILD DISCOVERY
A check of Crump’s cave produced a startling discovery.
“Among the common brown bats hanging from the ceiling was. South American Vampire Bat,” said Dr. Evans, an amateur naturalist. “Clearly, his bite was the source of Crump’s addiction to fresh blood.”
Tests proved their prisoner was clearly guilty, but fate spared the town the trauma of a prime-time trial. The next morning the redneck vampire was found dead in his cell.
“He figured he was about to be lynched, so he had asked for the last meal,” reported Dr. Evans. “A deputy obliged by bringing him a thirty-six-ounce T-bone. Well, all that feasting on blood had raised Vladdy-Joe’s cholesterol count to the bursting point. As he finished his food he had a massive coronary.
“It was justice,” Dr. Evans said. “Poetic justice. That steak went right to his heart.”
