#Myths: Why Can't Vampires Cross Running Water?

By: Casandra Vicario

There is a not-very-widespread belief, rarely mentioned in film and literature, that vampires (and other beings) could not cross running water.

Some argue that this flaw was incorporated into the fictional vampire of literature from a story told in Greek folklore. According to it, some dead who turned into vampires had to be banished from the island of Thessaly; anyone who passed nearby would see the dead wandering in a state of despair because they could not cross the salt water.

Water is one of the four basic elements of nature; the other three are fire, air, and earth. Almost all ancient peoples have given it a special character, endowed with symbolic meanings, many of them ambivalent. Later traditions, such as the Jewish and Christian faiths, also carried water's symbolic richness, as though it were an inheritance.

For Christians, for example, immersing the head in water reflects the rebirth of the human being. Agrippa states that the need for water is no less than that for fire, a belief found above all among European peoples, who have always maintained a correlation between these two elements, both symbols of purification and regeneration.

Both churches, the Latin and the Orthodox, used blessed water in funeral services. It would not be long before it was also used when the bodies of suspected vampires were to be killed a second time (although this may not have been a common practice—fictional literature was what gave it great popularity, since it is not mentioned in the vampire chronicles of the time)

And although the use of holy water does not appear in Bran Stoker's Dracula, it has been widely mentioned in later films and fiction novels, and is now, along with the crucifix and garlic, one of the most recognized and accepted methods of defense.

But this is not the only connection between vampires and water. In some areas of Russia, vampires were thrown into the water because it was believed the earth would not accept them into its bosom. In Germany, water was scattered around the revenant's grave to prevent its return.

Source: Vampiros. El Mito de los No Muertos. Noelia Indurain and Oscar Urbiola. pp. 60-61