St. Petersburg police accuse woman, 22, of 'vampire' attack on man
By Danny Valentine, Times Staff Writer
In Print: Friday, September 9, 2011
ST. PETERSBURG — The vampire attacked just before midnight on the porch of a vacant Hooters.
Milton Ellis, 69, was sleeping in his motorized wheelchair when he awoke to find Josephine Rebecca Smith, 22, of Pensacola on top of him, said police spokesman Mike Puetz.
She told Ellis she was a vampire and bit his face and neck. She bit off chunks of his face and part of his lip, Puetz said.
Ellis managed to escape and called for help at a nearby Shell gas station, where he had just met Smith. Face bloodied, he directed police to the Hooters at 10400 Roosevelt Blvd. N.
Police found Smith there, half naked and covered in blood, but uninjured. They said she had no idea what happened or why her clothes were off. Ellis said she was dressed when he last saw her, police said.
Ellis first encountered Smith after a relative dropped her off the Shell station, at Roosevelt Boulevard N and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Street N, police said. Smith tried calling a relative in Pensacola to pick her up. Ellis invited her to hang out with him at the vacant Hooters until someone picked her up. He eventually fell asleep.
Smith was arrested on a charge of aggravated battery on an elderly person. Bail was set at $50,000.
Ellis, who needed stitches after the attack, has been arrested numerous times in Pinellas County for offenses including panhandling, disorderly intoxication, trespassing and possession of an open container.
Oh, Quincy Harker! How the mighty have fallen! And I love the idea of a cursed and abandoned Hooters, the ultimate downmarket version of the spooky old haunted house.
I guess I'm just a huge cynic, but I'm thinking there's more to the story than either party wants to relate. Something along the lines of, "john stiffs working girl, working girl teaches john a lesson".
On the other hand, the same newspaper reported on a vampire sub-culture in the area a few years earlier. They weren't White Wolf LARPers, but self-professed "psychic vampires" who claim to feed off the life energy of others without having to draw blood. From the article:
Anyone who wants to get into a Vampire Gathering needs to see the gargoyles first. They're the protectors, the first line of defense against heckling street preachers and tourists.Belief in psychic vampirism is nothing new, though until very recently it was more closely associated with black magicians and other occult practitioners. The ability to drain life energy was supposedly gained through the use of spells or by developing certain mental powers. But the current generation of "psy-vamps" don't have time for that sort of effort. Like their kindred spirits the therianthropes and the otherkin, similar groups that have also created supernatural self-identities based on popular culture, they consider themselves to have been born special.. Thus, they don't have to put any effort into mastering complicated rituals in order to be better and more powerful than the "mundanes" around them, they simply have to be. Kids today, huh?
The women move along, but I remain, the first reporter ever allowed past the gargoyles, the first permitted to give you — my fellow "mundanes'' — a glimpse into their vampire world.
The monthly Gathering at the Castle nightclub isn't a role-playing game or a convention of Twilight fans. These people don't sleep in coffins, fear garlic or live forever.
But they do feel a need to feed on others, whether that means absorbing energy or blood. They call themselves vampires and consider their yearnings a physical affliction. They say they can't absorb energy like "mundanes," who often start every morning revved up for the day. They wake drained, needing to be charged.
All that said, I'm still sticking with the "pissed-of hooker" angle.
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