Residents of the African country of Malawi are in a state close to panic, already several dozen people said that they were attacked by “midnight vampires” and sucked blood from them. People are so frightened that seven lancers have already been killed by vigilante detachments suspected of being vampiric.
The threat has become so serious that UN workers and volunteers from the US Peace Corps were withdrawn from Malawi. The hysteria about vampires in Malawi began in September, we reported about it on the site, and it seems that by December it did not abate, although UN staff decided to return after the heat of September.
Local residents claim that all this is not hysteria and not rumors, but real facts. 40-year-old Jamia Bauleni tells that something alien entered her house and attacked her, and then began to suck her blood. Jamia lives in the village of Ngolongoliva in the south of the country and this village was in the center of vampire hysteria.
“It’s not rumors, it sucked my blood, I know it.” I lay on the bed at night and suddenly saw a light in the corner under the roof. I could not move a hand or a foot. And then something very pierced my hand and I felt pain.
Jamia, who works selling a ragout of wild peas, says that before she lost consciousness from the loss of blood, she heard a sound as if someone ran on the floor. After that night, the woman was taken to the hospital and she was treated there, taking medicine and vitamins.
She did not inform the authorities that she had been attacked, but there are many such cases in and around the district. Here they believe in witchcraft, vampires and black magic, and people crave revenge on those who attacked them.
Another victim is the 27-year-old Florence Kalung. She says that she slept at night in her house next to her husband and suddenly saw the light, as if a fire had been lit in the house. Then she heard the sound of the half-open door, and then a pain began in her finger, as if a needle had been stuck in it.
The entrepreneur Orlando Chaponda miraculously escaped death from vigilante who saw in his house “sucker of blood.” He says that he was lucky that they did not manage to get to him. Orlando called the police, who drove people away from his house.
“It does not really matter to them whether you are a vampire or not, they envy the rich and attack anyone and call him a vampire if he has a car,” Orlando says.
The Malawi National Blood Transfusion Service, the only institution that has a government permit to collect blood from donors for hospitals, says that rumors of vampires have also affected their work.
– This problem has greatly affected us. It prevents us from doing our work and collecting blood from donors. – says Brydon Mbaia, director of the service.
For attacks and attempts of lynching in Malawi, 250 people were arrested and more than 40 in neighboring Mozambique, where vampires were rumored to have come. The situation was forced to intervene President of Malawi Peter Mutarika.
“There’s no evidence of an attack by vampires,” he says. “But these false rumors are destabilizing the area. Those who spread such rumors, run into our laws.
Meanwhile, riots due to vampires have knocked down the country’s tourism industry. There are going to less and less Western tourists, and so the budget of the poor Malawi is short of a lot of superfluous money.
