Michelle

[Music – Jazz Suite Waltz No 2 by Dmitri Shostakovich]

 

EMILY BISHOP: You're about to hear a conversation between myself, Emily Bishop, and a person we're calling Michelle that took place in the afternoon of Sunday, March 13, 2022. Michelle is a vampire and this is their story

 

[Music – Jazz Suite Waltz No 2 by Dmitri Shostakovich]

[Sound of cassette being loaded and then recording]

 

MICHELLE: My name is Michelle Belanger and most folks who might recognize me would recognize me from my work on Paranormal State or Jack Osbourne's Portals to Hell, so I work within the paranormal community. I'm also an author, I've got about 30-35 books out. For the vampire community. I am one of the founding members of the modern vampire community as it exists. I've been active since the middle 90s when I founded House Kheperu. I'm the author of The Black Veil version, which is most widely accepted around the planet, honestly, as sort of the vampire version of the Wiccan read, so it's the most widely followed set of ethical guidelines. I'm also the author of The Vampire Ritual Book, and the Vampire Codex, which are foundational texts for a number of groups, particularly for energy vampirism, psychic vampirism and vampirism as a spiritual approach, and these were deemed significant enough for the movement that they are permanently hosted on sacredtexts.com as one of the most influential things for the community.

 

BISHOP: Can you walk us through what the average day in your life looks like?

 

MICHELLE: These days, especially with the pandemic, I get up probably around noon or so have a cup of tea, hang out with my cats, and write. When I'm not yelling on the internet at stupid people. A lot of my work is outreach, still working as a liaison. At this point, I exist at the intersection of the Venn diagram between the vampire community, the paranormal community, magic, witchcraft, occultism, geekdom, and sort of like where all of those places intersect. I'm often a bridge builder, and a communicator who helps to translate different worldviews for folks. In the past, a lot of work that I did, I've been called to do this less often. And honestly, that's great, because it was stressful. Whenever somebody dressed in black, shot up a school, whenever there was a question of satanic ritual abuse, if someone thought that somebody was involved with the vampire community, and they had committed a crime, especially when it was a false spin for that- kind of part of the Satanic Panic, I was the most frequently used resource as the counterpoint. So, I was on CNN Headline News, Fox News, a number of them as the "this is what this community is actually about. And here's how this person does not represent us. Here's where this person actually isn't even connected to us. You are seeing a connection because they have a profile on vampire freaks, which is a very different thing."

 

BISHOP: So how would you define a vampire?

 

MICHELLE: So my type of vampirism, I'm a psychic vampire. And a psychic vampire is someone who needs to regularly and actively take human vital energy in order to maintain their mental, physical, and spiritual well being. But for the definition of the vampire community, it's a broader umbrell- it's a broader umbrella. In some respects, it's an identity community. So we've got folks who are blood drinkers, and we've got folks who identify with the vampire as part of their lifestyle, in the sense that... Think about somebody who's really into country western music, but he's never seen a cow in his life. But he dresses that way. He's got the, you know, the big belt buckle and the 10 gallon hat and it's also a philosophy that informs his daily life, or hers, or theirs. And those are vampire lifestylers. So within the vampire community, if the person identifies with the Vampire, in some way or another enough that they adopt that word for themselves, they fall within the community.

 

BISHOP: You said that you identify as a psychic vampire. Can you elaborate a little more on what that means for you?

 

MICHELLE: So I'm also a psychic. Again, if people see me on TV and, and these two identities for me are inextricable, I'm aware of and can perceive the vital energy put out by people and stored by places, stuff that moves within. And without all of our life, folks that might have a hard time wrapping their head around it as trite as it sounds, think of it like the force, you know, it's woven throughout everything. Little bit less light side dark side, a lot more that we're all interconnected by vital something that we can't necessarily physically measure yet. Psychic vampires like myself, have a quality about them. It varies from person to person, that not only means they can perceive this and sense it, but something about them needs to take in more than the average person. Everybody, every living thing exchanges this energy and is usually involved in a reciprocal cycle, where energy is put out, energy is taken in and we are all sort of self-sustaining. The only reason that the word vampire fits for folks like me, or perhaps more appropriately vampiric as a quality, is that something about us means we take enough of this that we notice that it's a need.

 

BISHOP: So how did you first come to the conclusion that you needed this energy transfer.

 

MICHELLE: It was something I was instinctively doing from the time I was quite young as a child. That might have been a different story if I hadn't been raised in a family where psychic abilities were sort of part of the family heritage, we talked about it. I was encouraged to read and research and experiment, often from a psychological perspective of like also weighing it in the light of, you know, what psychosomatism, what is delusion? Like- like, can you find the line between those things, make sure you're not lying to yourself or mistaking something for this other thing that's going on. Although I had definitely connected with the archetype of the vampire... God, from like, seven or eight onward. I didn't discover writings that described psychic vampires as living human beings who had this capacity that matched up with my living experiences until I was in college. It was my freshman year. It's a book by Dion Fortune, which is the pen name of Violet Mary Firth. She was a psychoanalysis. She is a little problematic of a figure. I mean, she's she's writing at the late and of the 1800s, the beginning of the 1900s. So she's got some, she's got some attitudes that didn't aged very well. But her representation of what psychic vampirism was, was one of those like revelatory moments of like, holy crap, this, this is what I'm going through. And the one distinctly different aspect was from her perspective, anybody who had this capacity was just automatically a pre- a predator. Automatically was taking this from people against their will, almost couldn't resist preying on other people. And that part didn't match up. In middle school, in high school, I had already worked out ways to take energy from people, while also giving things back usually through like back massages, things like that like, like ways in exchanging with people, where if I didn't necessarily have the perfect word for it, I still knew what I was doing enough to explain it to my friends, and have these things going on where people would with consent to exchanges with me.

 

BISHOP: Can you walk us through the process of an energy exchange? How does that work? What does that feel like?

 

MICHELLE: This used to be a lot harder to describe until energy healing modalities became a lot more understood. It looks a lot like a Reiki, attunement. It's the easiest, simplest stuff is just hands on a person. And you know, I can stand behind them, place my hand just you know, over their shoulders, and usually will breathe in sync. But a lot of it is internal mental direction to connect to them. And then to draw from them. It can be done more intimately. It doesn't have to be. My, my grandfather, who I met in my 20s long after I sorted all of this stuff out, turned out to be like me. And because he was from the great generation, he was a World War Two vet. He had spent his entire life hiding it through sexual activity, that he would engage with multiple partners because he never wanted to wear one person out and part of that was taking energy from them, he never felt comfortable explaining it to people. And for him, the way to set off his conscience was to, if they were consenting for interacting with him on a sexual level, and the intimacy of that, it sort of gave him in his head like he had to justify it as like this was also consent for this other level, which was an integral way of interacting with him. What it feels like, on my end, is, there's a warm tingling sensation. At point of contact,  frequently, breathing very naturally will sync up, fairly typically heartbeats will also sync up. So there's some sort of like, you know, bio- bio electrical connection that happens. I start to feel... I don't know, warmer, more focused, there's a sort of expansion of awareness, a fair amount of psychic input from the other person will come through as well. So I get at least surface emotions, sometimes little blips of memories. It's, I try not to, like take too much of that, because I'm not trying to pry into somebody. But things do spill. On the part of the person that I'm taking from, that sense of tingling is also perceptible, it will usually become a full body sense of like buzzing and tingling. I've heard reports, variously of either it being very warm or feeling cold, often cold afterwards, once like there's been a significant amount of energy exchanged, often a euphoria. And when it's done consensually and with like full knowledge of what's going on, the person who has taken from doesn't experience pain, or anything particularly negative. There's usually a sort of lassitude, this deeply relaxed, almost lethargic state. Think about when you're just the right type of sleepy that what you want to do is curl up in a very fuzzy blanket, where it's like nice and toasty and just sort of doze because everything feels that relaxed.

 

BISHOP: Obviously, most people's conception of a vampire comes from pop culture. And you spoke a little bit earlier about people that kind of lifestyle as vampires and maybe identify more with that pop culture aspect. But how does the pop culture vampire differ from your personal life as a as a real vampire?

 

MICHELLE: Well, the only time I slept in a coffin was when I was part of the cast for Oliver. And we had a coffin on set. And it was one of the only places to take a good nap in between, my, my sets. I've worn fangs, but mostly because I've sung in metal bands, and in Gothic bands, and they're sort of fun to kind of like, dress up in vampire drag. But otherwise.... One of the things that is complicated with adopting an identity that is informed by a fictional or folkloric archetype, you see this with witches as well in witchcraft, there are elements that are almost empowering, to adapt as part of how you present yourself as a way of reclaiming the identity. So, from the time that I was a teen when I was like, okay, this is definitely something about who I was. I've worn black. I mean, I was also like, at the height of the goth movement. And so like, you kind of couldn't find many folks in the vampire community without hitting certain aspects of that. I mean, these days, it's a lot more relaxed, you know, hoodies T shirts, just kind of hanging around the house, avoiding COVID. I will say, I and in a number of folks in the vampire community, note that we tend to be more nocturnal than most. I am most creative at night. I am definitely not a morning person. If there's any way that I can avoid being up before noon, I will do so. I've worked a lot of my actual career around that. It helps with ghost hunting and the paranormal that most of that happens at night on TV, so it's not like they really need me at eight in the morning. I am photosensitive. Whether that is because I am vampiric or because of other health concerns is a big question mark. But I'm not the only person in the vampire community who reports that and this isn't just like, I think I'm sensitive to light like this is confirmed by you know, optometrists and doctors, the retinas are incredibly pale. I've got fantastic night vision. It's interesting to chicken or the egg it. So given that I was more comfortable sitting in the dark, was more likely to be nocturnal. And I had this other capacity. And we have this vampire archetype written into our culture. Did I identify with that because I saw certain things that I was already experiencing. Or maybe people like me sometimes informed how we present this, this character of the vampire, which led to some of my research on John William Polidori, Lord Byron, Bram Stoker, and Sir Henry Irving, who was in many ways is sort of his starting point for Dracula, not necessarily the historical one, because there was Vlad Tepes involved in that, but as a person, there are aspects of Irving's personality and quirks that got worked into that character. The same with Byron. So there are historical figures who may have influenced and certainly influenced the vampire as it appears in our fiction, and which then informed the vampires as appears in cinema. So there's, again this weird reciprocal interaction of lived experience, adopted identity, and pop culture presentations. Where's the clear line? I've spent nearly 50 years at this point, there isn't a clear line. And you'll find the same with witchcraft and witches, there isn't a clear line.

 

BISHOP: What are some common misconceptions about the vampire community?

 

MICHELLE: Well, first of all, that we're all blood drinking Satanists that we're, you know, horrible nefarious people, or that we are all 17-year-old edge lords that are sitting in, you know, mom and dad's basement, just feeling very dark and broody about ourselves. That's not to say that there aren't folks like that in the community. Again, when you're working with an identity community, and it is up to each person to determine how they identify with something, it's not my place to say you're a vampire, you're not a vampire based on that, like, do you- is this an identity you wish to adopt? But the misconceptions really are like that we're evil, that we're somehow satanic that we are predatory, just by default. It's interesting in like the witchcraft and psychic community that there's still a lot of fear about folks who are psychic vampires who might prey on your energy. There's a lot of self-defense texts. It's a little bit better than it used to be, but it 20 years ago, I met one fellow who was part of a Wiccan Coven, and his Coven threatened to kick him out for the sheer fact that he knew me. And they were convinced that I would be able to suck the energy of their rituals from Cleveland, even though they were in Milwaukee. Like that, like some really ridiculous ideas, like, first of all, why would I want to? I just, I don't care. And I think that's the other, like, really big misconception. I'm also part of the queer community. And it reminds me of that sense of when somebody finds out that you're gay. And they're like, oh, no, you might hit on me. And I'm like, Honey, I don't care. And again, oh, my God, you're a vampire, you're gonna feed off of me? No, why would I want to? That's honestly a fairly intimate interaction, I need to be able to trust the person I do that with and I just don't want to put everybody in my head in my head and my mouth and all that.

 

BISHOP: So you've been involved with the vampire community for several decades now. And were a founding member in many ways. So how did you first come to get involved? And how did that all get started?

 

MICHELLE: A lot of it was my personal quest to see if there were other people like me. So, you know, way back in the stone age before the internet. I went to college. Well, first, I grew up in a fairly small town in Ohio, I had limited access to a lot of reliable information about magic, energy work, things like that. My family was Irish American, immigrants, one or two generations removed. So psychic abilities were a part of their worldview, the sense that this was passed down. But the idea that somebody was vampiric, like any of the darker stuff, anything as magic, or the occult, was seen as very threatening. And that was reinforced by the society at the time because there was this whole thing called the Satanic Panic going on. So you could have- it was it was a weird like double think. You could have experiences of you know, dreams that came true or spirits communicating with you things like that. But if you studied it, that was the occult, and there was a road down to Satanism. Once I went to college, I didn't have people like helicoptering around me so much. So I read widely. And first it was finding folks like Dion Fortune from the 19th century where I was like, okay, this, this fits, but what about people now? At the same time, there were two other big movements going on. There was a gothic subculture, which was art, and music, and poetry, fashion that grew out of the punk and post punk industrial stuff. And there was also zine culture. And that was very important for me. At.... Unrelated to vampirism, a Star Trek convention, I ran across a couple of zines, some of which were specifically for the Gothic subculture, and at least one of which was specific to vampires. It was sort of the very beginning of a vampire community that was communicating with one another. There were definitely groups and isolated individuals, a couple of like, honestly, frankly, very like hoity toity darklord, groups that had existed in the 70s and 80s, prior to this, but this was people who were trying to just communicate with one another, exchange their experiences, and see if anybody was out. Anybody else was out there. So I started my own zine, it was called Shadow Dance. We had a lot of communication behind the scenes. So a very lively pen pal network, which ultimately became formalized into what I called the International Society of Vampires. A newsletter, sort of membership, in the sense that like you paid to produce the newsletter and everything and for postage, that thing that we don't worry about so much anymore. The International Society of Vampires started around like 94-95. And there were folks involved in that from everywhere, like all around the US, Canada, Mexico, but also Egypt, Japan, multiple countries in Europe, South Africa, like it was, it was really quite impressive for the time. It got the attention of a couple of researchers at the time. J. Gordon Melton, who wrote The Vampire Book, and Texas journalist, Jeff Guinn and his partner, Andy Grieser, who, in 96, put out a book called Something in the Blood. And it was working with Jeff Guinn, giving him information from the census that I'd taken like we, from all the members of like, you know, how to identify, what's your background, what other marginalized communities are you a part of like, like I had... I like data. So I was passing that along with them, did enough work with them on their book that when they came through in their book tour, they actually picked me up and had me on TV and had me on a bunch of like morning shows.

 

At that time, I was still in the closet, as a public person. I was finishing up my degree, I was working toward a master's. And I was well aware that I was not going to get tenure in the middle 90s as Hi, I'm a vampire. Like, it was bad enough that I'm intersex, I'm 6'1", it's hard to miss that I'm queer. Like all of those things worked against me in my career. So vampire was just going to be a bridge way too far. So I worked with Guinn and Grieser as like, I am the person who helps publish this, but I'm not a vampire myself. And of course, they saw right through it. They were like, Mmm, you should be writing this. So 96. What led to everything else for me, there's, you know, this network going, there's all these communications going like there's little groups popping up here and there. We're communicating through letters and zines and whatnot. The internet has just started to be a thing. There was an AOL, like chat room called Real Vampires: No RP, which if you find people my age and older, they were probably there. And if they don't admit to it, they were probably there under a name that they just want to bury. 96 saw two significant events that sort of changed things for a lot of us. One was the Susan Walsh disappearance in New York City. Susan Walsh was a journalist. She had a, I don't remember his daughter or a son. She had a young kid. She had previously done an expose on the Russian mafia in New York, and I think that is an important thing to note. So that happened, and then she decided to do an expose on the vampire community. She went to meet up with one of her contacts and she disappeared, never to be heard from again. And by disappeared, I mean, she left her kid in the car, went to like go meet up with someone to go somewhere else, never came back. Of course, it was assumed that it was the vampire community that did something horrible to her, dumped her body, fed off of her, who even knows like, like, there was a lot of like really dark Satanic Panic and sensationalism spun around this. When really the much higher likelihood is the stuff she published about the Russian- Russian mafia really probably caught up with her. But nobody knows. At the time, vampires abduct journalist was the thing. And shortly after that there was a young man from Murfreesboro, Kentucky, I think he had a little group of friends, whether or not they were just role playing vampires, or were part of like the folks who were doing sick like Vampire things like... Long story short, he got his buddies to drive down to Florida to their one friend's house, and he murdered her parents. So these vampire murders, coupled with the disappearance of the journalist in 96, made the vampire community like it was center stage for this sense that here are these dark people all dressing in black and they drink blood and they're horrible, and there's just it was the height of the Satanic Panic. It was not too long after the West Memphis Three had been wrongly imprisoned with Damien Echols, put on death row for the murder of three young boys in their town, that they're still trying to get the officials to release things like DNA evidence which they had buried for years, it's... But their connection to heavy metal music. The goth subculture, vampirism, the occult, like all of this stuff was just a big fucking mess. And there were a couple of television talk shows- Ricki Lake was the one that stood out to me. For me, this was the key moment of where I went from being, you know, a closeted person in this community who was definitely doing a lot of work, but was not making it part of my public persona. Because of the work with Something in the Blood, The Ricki Lake Show reached out to me and wanted me on their little vampire expose. And at the time, I was like, well, I'm a vampire expert, I can come on and explain to you about the community. I've got, you know, this and this and this. They're like, well, well, wouldn't you like an all expenses paid trip to New York? And we'll put you up here and you could be a vampire? No. Do you have a friend who's willing to be a vampire for all of these perks? At which point it was very obvious to me that they didn't care about presenting the community, they wanted a sensationalistic moment to like, really bank on the fear.

 

And I just couldn't let that stand. There were definitely folks who really enjoyed being in the spotlight, whether they were part of the community or not, they didn't represent us very well. And this was a time when I had friends who had their children taken away because of how they identified. I had at least one friend who, by all accounts was investigated by the FBI had all of her material, her computers, everything seized, because she'd been in contact with Rod Farrell, of the vampire murders. It... It's really hard to read, well, no, no, no, it's not hard to recapture how scary the Satanic Panic was, then, because we're living in something that's very much like rocketing right to it again. Where you are afraid to be out in the public, because there are people who have been emboldened to attack you, because you do not fit their idea of what is a proper expectable like respectable human being. Whether it's, you know, whether you're queer, whether you're trans, whether you're whatever, like people are emboldened to attack you because you don't fit. No it's definitely the case for the vampire community. At the time, you know, New York Times, The Chicago Tribune, Discovery Channel wouldn't work with you as an expert if you were not willing to go by your real first and last name. Now the talk shows were a different story because like you had Lord Vlad Dark, whatever and like Lady Raven,Dolphin Dancer, and like, like, they kind of encouraged that because it really also undermined the credibility in a lot of people's eyes. So at that point, where I was making the decision of like, do I fast track to a professorship? Do I like, like, what am I doing with the with this point in my life, I had been a national merit scholar. I was on a full ride, just finished like college for my Bachelor's on a full ride scholarship. I chose to support my community. And kind of the rest is history. I did a lot of free labor, I did a lot of work just out of pocket. Because there was nobody else at the time who had the skill set necessary to be able to go like on live uplink to something like CNN Headline News, and hold their own when the people interviewing you are just trying to make you look, and your whole community look, like nefarious, delusional, crazies. And, yeah, so that's what I did for about 20 years of my life.

 

BISHOP: How did it feel when you when you first started these zines, and you're finding people that are like you, and forming this community? What was that like?

 

MICHELLE: It was really cool. Like to see and like hear from other people that they had experiences like my own. I'm an academic, I'm a scholar, like I was raised with belief in psychic abilities, but also a very firm belief in psychology, and science. And especially in my, my teens, and 20s, there was this thing of like, this is really important to me, but is it all in my head? Is it real? Is it legitimate? I'd made my peace by like 92 or 93, that even if it was just a personal narrative, it was important enough to me that it was okay for me that it was real to me. And it didn't have to be real to anybody else. But then I started hearing from other people that they had the same experiences that like how I felt if I didn't feed was what other people would do, that they struggled with the idea of like, how a vampire is presented in folklore and fiction and pop culture and how the word does and doesn't fit us. And it was revelatory to know I wasn't alone.

 

BISHOP: So you've written several books, among them, the Psychic Vampire Codex.

 

MICHELLE: Mhm

 

BISHOP: Can you talk a bit about the contents of that book?

 

MICHELLE: So I got really frustrated in the 90s. As I was trying to do research for psychic vampirism, people who identify as vampires, living vampires, like everything that I did find among new agers, and witches, and occultists to a book was, if they acknowledge that this existed, it was always evil. It was always predatory you, you had no choice but to be a horrible person. And I said, Nope, I needed to have a book out there that was the book that I needed. Like, like if I had run across that book as an earlier teen like it would have helped me skip the stage of doubt and self-loathing and this question of like, but am I a monster? So I started compiling notes in 91 or 92. It's hilarious because I still have like, notebooks from my psych classes. And I'm like, psychopharmacology notes. And then I'm like, theoretical stuff on energy exchange and psychic vampirism like side by side. And... I'm trying to think of when I first compiled it as the Codex. The very word is pretty revelatory of the fact that I moved out of psychology into comparative religious studies, because Codex Sinaiticus is one of the, one of the early Bibles one of the earliest Bibles. So the idea of a codex, a certain type of book that is organized by little pieces, kind of like mini chapters that can move around. I didn't want to call it a vampire Bible, somebody already had one of those. And they were one of those pyramids, scheme groups that was, well, first of all, a little too self consciously dark. At this point, it's been revealed that they've got like, direct connections to white nationalist, like, like kind of Nazi occultism. Like they're, they're just a mess. So I called it the Codex. And I hand wrote, sort of like the core of the text in 94. And started passing it around, like having different versions of it through the International Society of Vampires. Like it was sent out to people piecemeal. There were a couple of self-published versions of it, I actually lost track of how many different editions. When it became a little easier to put things up online, there was a version that went up through one of my AOL pages. That's how oldthat is, which I believe is where the fellow who founded sacred texts first found it and it kind of became this this big thing to the point now that there are terms and concepts that didn't exist under specific words prior to writing that, that are now so much a part of the vampire community that I've had people argue with me that like, No, you didn't write that that was like that forever. And I'm like, No, but that's, that's fine. Like, the idea wasn't to be proprietary about it, you know, the idea of vampiric awakening, or the beacon, or any of the rest of it. The idea was to get the information out there so that people wouldn't be stumbling around in the dark like I had to.

 

BISHOP: So what was the process of researching for that?

 

MICHELLE: I mean, reading widely, not merely things like Dion Fortune's, Psychic Self-Defense, but as many world traditions that I could get my hands on, that had an understanding of energy, some aspect of like, this connection between breath and life for energy and blood, and the ability of humans to connect to it and to direct it and to exchange it. That took me to like the Bhagavad Gita and the Vedas, various texts in Taoism, Shinto, a lot of traditional Chinese medicine and Qigong. Reiki was just starting to like gain, like real acceptance at the time. So I got like, up to my Reiki three, like I learned different energy modalities to compare and contrast to what I was already experiencing. I took copious notes about what I experienced, I worked closely with a lot of consensual donors, and would basically sit down and interview them, like after doing exchanges of like, you know, what did this feel like? What did this feel like? You know, check in a couple of days later check in a week later, like what else is happening? Reaching out to as many other folks who identified as vampires or suspected that they might be, and in many cases, sat down and actually just interviewed them, like, what are your beliefs about this? What's your experience about this? I've got reams and reams of notes. And also like, just like fascinating belief systems that different groups and individuals spun to sort of explain why. Because that was the big question for all of us. Like, I know, I'm like this, but why, what does it mean?

 

BISHOP: So you also earlier mentioned composing, like a set of ethical guidelines for vampirism. Can you explain what those guidelines are?

 

MICHELLE: Yeah, so The Black Veil is not my title. And it was not initially my idea, there was a vibrant vampire community in New York City, in the early and middle 90s. And it was woven cheek to gel with Vampire the Masquerade. So there was live action role playing and definitely like gaming role playing, make believe. But also like, at the same time, it was the easiest place where folks who identified as vampires to meet up with one another and like these two things became very intertwined. In Vampire the Masquerade, the role playing game, there is a set of guidelines called the Traditions of the Masquerade. And they are traditions of like, introduce yourself when you first come to a city, traditions of like respecting, you know, the people that you feed off of like, do not break the masquerade, basically don't like go running around saying that you're a vampire. Because of the interwoven nature of the vampire community, the sanguinarium in New York City, the role playing game rules, got adapted to rules for the community. And there was a point where they were pretty obviously plagiarized, one to the next. Now, I had worked within the gaming community as well, I was a contractor for Wizards of the Coast. I wrote games for White Wolf. Like this... I don't think it's entirely possible to, you know,  separate the things that inspire you from the things that you also express as art. That can get fuzzy for some people. But I also recognized again, this was also like, where we experimented and played with like, what does this identity mean to us? So at the time that I ran across the sanguinarium in 97, when I first started like really get heavily online, I saw this and first of all, I was like, this is poorly... Like you're already pretending that this is plagiarized, like, please, please. We get a lot of shit from so many people that we are just role players that we are his little edge lords who took it a little too far. So could we maybe make a split between the game stuff and the real stuff. So I offered to rewrite it. And it was already called the Black Veil at the time. And I first rewrote it as what was called the 13 Rules of Community. Because the folks in New York especially were pretty married to some of the values that were baked in from the tradition of the masquerade like, I made sure to have an homage to this idea of hospitality within the community, the idea that if you're traveling and you come into the city, you seek out the community, and let people know that you're there, partly so that you have this network. Actually, one of the things that I really liked about the vampire community at the time was, you could travel anywhere in the country. And if you needed someplace to crash, and you make contact with the other folks in the vampire community, we looked out for one another. And that was baked right into this set of ethical guidelines. It was also very important to me to make sure that we clearly wrote into those guidelines. The fact that we are consensual, that we only take energy from people who are willing- or blood or anything that this interaction, this vampiric exchange is done with the willing knowledge of the people who are donors to us, that we respect those people, that their boundaries are respected. That was twofold. One, those are really important things to make sure that they're explicit. But also, they gave us something to point at, on those occasions that vampire murders happened or reporters went missing. And we can be like, these are not the values of our community, the value- to be part of our community, you adhere to these values. We look out for one another, we police our own, we uphold discretion, which is to say that we don't just go shouting to the world, or like walk up to somebody in the supermarket and say, Hey, did you know that I'm a big dark vampire? You know? Because there were definitely people who that was how they processed this identity. And that didn't work for anybody.

 

BISHOP: So who in your life did you first tell that you were a vampire?

 

MICHELLE: Friends in college, my boyfriend at the time, other close friends. I hit a point where I called my grandmother, who raised me, up, and it was a weird conversation because I just assumed that maybe she kind of didn't believe me, or she thought I was going through some sort of like college crisis. Cuz she was just sort of like, oh, okay, that's like, Okay. I've got a complicated family background. When I reached out to my mom, who did not raise me, my birth mother only was in my life for the first five years and then kind of sporadically. The conversation with her was a little bit different, because she was really worried that it was... That there was a darkness that I was struggling with some sort of like evil andI was like not, not really. Tellingly, she was genuinely more disturbed by the fact that I'm queer than the fact that I'm vampiric, which, I'm not sure how that works with my very hippie mom. But that's where we were at. I knew a lot of folks where like, the only people they felt comfortable talking about their identity was other folks that they knew for sure, were safe because they were also part of the community. That was also why that set of guidelines was important to get a sense of like what defined our community, to set boundaries to create a safe space where we could be supporters to one another, where we could be confidants to one another, and in some cases, protectors. Because, you know, it was a time where, if you were gay, you would get kicked out, if you were too goth, you could get kicked out. I knew a lot of folks who had exorcisms performed on them, because their well intentioned, very Christian parents, were sure that their children were possessed because, you know, pick a reason they were listening to heavy metal music, they were dressing like they were goths. They were, you know, dating boys kissing girls like it, just take a list if they didn't fit. And so they were they were abused under the veil of religion. So we needed a safe place to be.

 

BISHOP: So being a public figure having authored books, you've been on TV shows, more public interviews, what is being a vampire in the public sphere like?

 

MICHELLE: I mean, these days it's kind of weird, because with the paranormal shows, even though you can't, by my opinion, separate the vampire from the psychic. TV is very reductionist, they don't expect the audience to be able to like, really get a lot of nuance. So you get labels, and you get like little boxes to get put in. So I'm a psychic, I'm a medium. But if they don't think that the audience is going to like really grok, the idea of vampire, they leave that part out entirely. It's not like I stopped being that. But also, it's not like I jump up and down and be like, by the way, I'm a vampire guys. So it's weirdly compartmentalized based on people's perception. I do a lot of things. I write fiction, and I write games, I write nonfiction. I work in the paranormal community. I work in the vampire community, I work in the queer community, I write music. I wear many, many hats. And it is always astounding to me, kind of how that reductionist attitude that Hollywood really perpetuates, has taken root in our culture in general, because I have folks who know me as a musician, and then are astounded to find that I write books, nevermind that I'm a vampire. The one thing that I will say is, when I first- I live in suburbia in Ohio, it is a red state, the county I live in is very red. I am surrounded by MAGA hats and Q-anon folks, to the point where I've got, you know, queer friends and other friends where I'm like, just be careful with how many bumper stickers you put on your car, I'm not sure if the people in the big trucks will run you off the road. And those attitudes, although they've gotten more extreme in recent years, were still here when we bought this house, bought the house for a number of reasons. But I mean, the price was right. And it's near to where I grew up, like it's where I'm comfortable. And I'll be damned if I move out of a space just because I'm told I'm not supposed to belong, like everybody's like, Oh, move to move to California. And I'm like, But if all of the people like us, move out, how do we change anything? So I am very stubborn and very determined to be here. When I first bought the house, and was moving in my books, I have a couple 1000 books. The neighbors were very wigged out like here are these weird black clad people, they were sure that you know, this was suddenly people who are moving into apparently a former city councilman house. And we were going to be like sacrificing goats in the basement or something like they were just sure, terrible things were going to happen. It's a hilarious story now in retrospect, I guess the neighbors on that side, saw us move in, was moving some of the books, some of the- the bottom tore out of one of the boxes, and my one friend who looks sort of like a biker who left the Harley at the top of the street, very roundly and loudly had this big booming deep voice, custom bluestreak. And I think that was enough to make them really worried that something terrible was going to happen, that we would have loud parties or that we were, you know, insert stereotype here.

 

At some point, this is when the Psychic Vampire Codex was just coming out through Weiser Books. And I had a teeny, tiny little bumper sticker on the back of my car with my website on it. Without my knowledge, the neighbor or his wife went, checked out my car, found the website, checked out the website. I was also in a metal band at this time. We had just finished an angels are weeping tour. And we had done like some pretty cool like, but very like heavy metal, like blood dripping angels weeping like like, just fun photos as part of like the album and well, they saw it and they were sure that I was just going to abduct their daughters and do horrible things to them. So their solution was to go into the police station and try to file a police report. Because I was a child molester. I hadn't done anything. But they were sure based on those photos that I was a predator. They wanted to see if I was a registered sex offender. They went like the whole nine yards. They couldn't obviously, file a police report because there was nothing that I had done beyond move into the house. But I'm not too far from where I went to school. And somebody I went to high school with apparently worked at the police station. I was a national merit scholar. I was one of two met- national scholars. I was you know, top 10 of my class. I was really socially awkward. And I think a lot of people in high school assumed that my inability to socialize meant that I was stuck up. All I know is this person recognized my name and was like, Oh, that person I hate that person. So he took it upon himself not to file a report, but instead to notify all of the local newspapers that a vampire had moved in. Which led to some ridiculous stuff, including a little news article that was in I think the Medina Post that was- had the headline, "Vampire Evades Arrest." There were no cops chasing me like nobody even came to my door like but it was it was just horrible, like Satanic Panic, awful stuff. I didn't know about this going on, you know, I'm trying to like move into my house. I've got a book launch. I've got you know, all of this music stuff going on. I'm touring. I am just trying to get enough sleep to go from day to day. And we start getting all the neighborhood kids showing up at the front door, asking to see the vampires, leaving garlic on the on the cars. Just just weird stuff happening where we finally you're like, how did you even know like what's going on? We find out that there's a city councilman, who's up for reelection who is going door to door in our neighborhood, letting people know that vampires had moved in, and that he with his good Christian values would protect everybody. It was obscenely ridiculous. And interestingly, once I was more visible on television, with Paranormal State, all the neighbors who were just like, Oh, you must be terrible because you dress in black. Now I'm just the quirky psychic person. It... I don't know. But yeah, when we first moved in, it was not fun. They vandalized my car. They vandalized the house. Like there was just all sorts of terrible shit going on. And the local police wanted nothing to do to protect things on my end, they really just wanted us to go.

 

BISHOP: That really sucks. I'm really sorry.

 

MICHELLE: Yeah, it...I think if I didn't have 15 other things going. And also, by the way, my mom was dying of breast cancer at the time. She died that year, my grandfather died that year. Like if I didn't have like all of these things all happening at the same time, it wouldn't have been quite so bad. But it was it was really quite a lot to deal with.

 

BISHOP: Yeah. Can you elaborate about being a psychic?

 

MICHELLE: The trajectory of my life is interesting as far as television goes, because I started doing documentary work and television work as a media liaison, an activist for my community. But television is such that once your face is recognizable, and people like the way that you talk, you are more likely to get opportunities to do further stuff. And so from vampire media liaison, suddenly I was contacted by the folks with Paranormal State who had this paranormal show going on. And they wanted to bring me in as an occultist and an expert and, you know, work that I'd already done on, you know, History Channel and Discovery Channel documentaries. And initially, I wasn't there as a psychic. And I hadn't really billed myself as a psychic like I've done all of this work and research in energy work and psychicism, like it's it's part of just understanding who I am, and uh why my life works the way it does. But it's also so much a part of who I am that it's not like, I hide it. So it became obvious that I was picking up psychic stuff when they had me out for this first episode. And that was much more interesting to the production company than just having me as the person who went and did research at the county archives. So I suddenly became a psychic medium as far as TV was concerned. And for me the opportunity to test these abilities. It has been a constant personal quest to find that line between psychological influence and like, just how the brain works. A lot of my undergrad work was in psychology. So I understand how our minds and perceptions lie to us, how we will frequently interpret things to fit our expectations, often divorced from how reality actually is. And as someone who's had psychic experiences and perceptions of people that seemed to be numinous and metaphysical since I was tiny, figuring out like, where does that split? Like, when is it psychological? And when is it psychic? So working as a psychic on TV lets me go to random places have never heard of before. I had to fight for the ability for them to tell me nothing. Give me like no clues, no anything. And it's this constant ability to test. What do I pick up? Is there any way that I could have gotten that from a more traditional way of perceiving the world? And it's sort of like a constant field experiment. I mean, it can't be a laboratory experiment. It's never, you know, full laboratory controls. There's so many different variables, you can't control them all. But it lets me continue that journey of understanding myself and like, how does this work and why?

 

[Sound of cassette recording and being stopped]

[Music – Jazz Suite Waltz No 2 by Dmitri Shostakovich]

 

BISHOP: Thanks for listening to this interview from The Vampire Tapes. I hope you enjoyed it. There are five interviews in this series, so be sure to listen to all of them. For more information on this project, check out tinyurl.com/vampiretapes.

 

[Music – Jazz Suite Waltz No 2 by Dmitri Shostakovich]