Well, it’s a half vampire, half human hybrid of course, Blade taught us that. But this idea didn’t come from the entertainment world. The idea of a vampire/human mix comes straight from age-old vampire lore, Gypsy lore to be exact.
Dhampir is the name the Slavonic Gypsies came up with to call the child of a vampire. This child has some of the powers that its vampire parent has, what these powers are depend on the vampire and myth. How a dhampir is made is also a something that Gypsies debated on. The most commonly believed method is that a newly made male vampire is super horny and feels the need to go back to his human widow to sex her up, if he didn‘t have a wife during life, then he‘ll go after any young woman he can find. It was then possible for his wife or whoever to become pregnant with his vampire baby. That baby was then known as a dhampir but some other Gypsies didn’t use this word, sometimes they would call the child a vampir (if male), vampuiera (if female), vampijerovic, or lampijerovic. Some believed that this child was always male, then you had others saying that it died shortly after birth because its body was made of something like jelly and another rumor was that it in fact wasn’t special at all – that it was a normal human. But for the most part it was believed that it was a child with a vampire parent and a human parent and that because of its vampire blood it had special powers. And when it came to inheriting the lust for blood, well that’s another thing that changes from myth to myth. In some cases a dhampir craves blood, but other times it has no desire for it.
These dhampirs born were usually turned into vampire hunters because of their powers to detect and destroy the undead. Yup, that didn’t come from Blade or BloodRayne, dhampirs in the past were said to hunt vampires. In Serbia it is believed that vampires are invisible and that only dhampirs are able to see them, therefore dhampirs were paid to hunt down and kill these vamps. How this played out is a dhampir would go out to kill the vampire, if you were watching you would see a person flailing around, apparently wrestling with an invisible foe. After some time the dhampir would declare to the watching villagers that the vampire was dead and then he or she would collect a large payment from the town. The last time this happened was in 1959 in the Yugoslavian province of Kosovo.
- Moonlight
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In the Vampire Acadamy series, there are Dhampires and Moroi and Strigoi and other things like Vampires :)