When I told my university graduate advisor I needed to go to Mykonos to do research--there on that fabulous Greek Island of sin and sun, he thought I was kidding. He accused me of just looking for an excuse to get out of California that summer. Said I would just hang out all day on the islands, drinking ouzo  instead of Corona. Professor Phillips even accused me of just wanting to cavort with the beautiful rich girls who migrated there each warm season on their yachts. You know, the ones who wear $500 bikinis while dancing away the night in clubs at the azure fringe of the Aegean.

But my dear professor was wrong. Wrong because Historical Vampirism--my doctorial topic, happens to have a very long history in Greece, descending from the ancient culture's mythology, through the Middle Ages, the Crusades, the Renaissance, and leading right up to the peak of research's interest in the 'walking dead"--the 18th and 19th centuries. That's when the real "vampire hunters," mostly from France and Britain did their extensive work in Central and Eastern Europe. These tireless sleuths traced waves of hysteria southward to the edge of the Mediterranean, and as I was to discover painfully, yet also sweetly, to a rich and troubling history of them on certain of the Greek Islands. 

For it It was here on Mykonos, that little barren piece of human wickedness and bliss in the center of the Cycladic islands, that I met a sub-culture of beings as fascinating as they were deadly to infiltrate.

My name is Bryce Beaumont and I never set out from the University of California, San Diego to be a "vampire chaser"--at least not in the pompous Victorian sense of the term. Academically speaking, my quest was always to study the belief  in vampirism  historically, not the actual specimens themselves. How that belief system spread across the landscape to the Mediterranean eventually became the subject of my doctorial dissertation. And read it if you wish, but that's only the outer shell of what I was to finally discover. Put bluntly, my goal was never to encounter descendants of the "undead," though remarkably that is what I will tell you happened here.

I had simply set out to record the cases of people's horrific records of interaction with these unfortunate souls, yet somehow got lost along the way. And as it turned out, there was plenty to record-- particularly around a certain central island of the Aegean Sea known today for its opulence and decadence. What I intend to share with you about my research and experiences on Mykonos, is all true. It has, in fact for better or worse, become a real game-changer in my life. I will faithfully write this testimony for you or for whomever wishes to continue work exploring this very real phenomenon of human history. One which defies all logic and current scientific observation. 

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