The belief in Vampires or Vampire-like beings well predates the modern era, and superstitions about them ran deep. Those beliefs extended even to the modern era, when “vampire panics” led people to exhume corpses they thought were somehow affecting the living.
The appeal of one strange object, which achieved dizzying popularity in my lifetime, and today lives on mostly for nostalgia, is not so difficult to explain. All you need to do is turn one on and wait.
During the civil war, the manufacture of powder and explosives was often handled by the most vulnerable, young women and children, whose labor was needed when so many men had been sent off to war. On March 13, 1863, the confederacy experienced a munitions disaster, in the confederate capitol of Richmond.