Meet Julia Caples, 45, from Pennsylvania - she's close to what you read in your horror novels. She's a vampire. No, we're not kidding, she's a mother of two, obsessed with vampires, and loves human body. Correction. Live human blood.
Infact, she's been drinking half a gallon of it, in just a month. And she's been doing it for the past 30 years.
And who's her victim, oops, donor? They are your average vampire fans, who are not so hard to find these days. These fans supposedly allow her to drink their blood willingly, she claims.
The 'drinking' sessions usually take place at her home, or sometimes, at the local occult goods and oddities store that she runs. To 'drink,' she cuts her donor with a sterilized needle that she designed herself, and then moves on to get the drink.
"When I feed off of a person and drink their blood I feel stronger and healthier,' she claimed. "I know scientifically there's not a lot nutrition in blood, but maybe there's some value we haven't discovered yet."
She developed her first urge to bite and get a sip when she was just a teenager. "It was my natural instinct and I liked the taste. I just got an urge and can't really explain it. It's never gone away. Needless to say though, he never kissed me again," she explained.
Her passion for blood grew slowly, but things changed when she met her now ex-husband Donald Lazarowicz, and she started drinking blood regularly.
Both her kids, Ariel, 24 and Alexei, seem to have some reservations with their mother's blood diet.
"We have all these decorations at home like coffins and dolls. I'm starting to think she's a vampire," Ariel said. "I don't agree with it. I think she runs a lot of health risks. I worry she might get a disease from someone through the blood."
To this, Caples explains that she first personally meets the aspiring donors, gets them checked for blood diseases like AIDS, and if they are clean, she starts with the drink.
Thousands of years ago, people used to drink blood, but that was merely due to deficiencies in their bodies, hematologist Steven Gruenstein claims.
