Want a few more fun facts to share this Halloween?

Edgar Martin del Campo, a visiting assistant professor of anthropology at Rhode Island College, has unearthed some interesting tales about vampires, witches and the like as part of his research into folklore of the supernatural in Mexico.

For example, he said, the notion that vampires turn into bats predates Bram Stoker and his legendary novel, Dracula. It likely dates to the days of the earliest explorers of the New World, in a time when people believed that vampires were corpses that came back to life to drink the blood of the living.

So when explorers to the New World discovered vampire bats in the tropics sucking the blood of large mammals such as cows and horses, they believed that they would suck the blood of humans too.

It would have made sense to them back then, del Campo said, especially because the ancient Romans believed in a witch called a “strix” who transformed into an owl at night and ate children. Similar beliefs or legends have been found in ancient German, China, the Amazon and among Native Americans in the Southwest.

The ancient Mayans believed that both bats and owls were messengers from the underworld, del Campo said, because they flew at night and were associated with darkness.

This also was the era of the werewolf, he said, and in Romanian folklore, it was believed that a child conceived on Christmas or Easter would be born a werewolf and when the werewolf died, he or she would become a vampire.

One of the most popular supernatural creatures in Mexican folklore, he said, is the “nagual,” a witch that can turn into an animal. That’s an ancient legend that’s still believed in some areas today, he said.

Hmmm… transfiguration, or the art of transforming from a person into an animal, was considered an act of high magic in the popular Harry Potter series of books. In fact, del Campo said, the name Hogwarts — the school where Harry and others learned the trade of witchcraft — likely is based on the Welch word “hargward” which means priest or “guardian of the altar.”

Back in the real world, in many African societies, people used to believe that witchcraft was an ability that some people were born with because it came from an organ that not everyone had.

Speaking of witches, Halloween is considered a sacred day even among modern day witches because it’s the midpoint between fall and winter, and it’s the threshold between the season of life and death.

“That’s why it’s so sacred,” he said.