Today’s Friday Freaks post comes from The Hope Chest (warning: language NSFW) via BoingBoing.net. The Hope Chest’s tagline is “Bad News from the Past”, and it features scanned articles from old newspapers from the early 1900’s. Recently The Hope Chest has had a vampire obsession, specifically, vampire cars.
The term “vampire auto” doesn’t refer to Grandpa Munster’s Drag-u-la, as pictured above, but used to refer to cars that had seeming taken on a mind of their own and have gone out of control, usually with tragic results. Here’s how Hope Chest puts it…
The democratization of the automobile in the late Teens and Twenties was not without its social costs. Neighborhood pedestrians conditioned to horse-drawn traffic were slow to adapt to the new speed of life; drivers didn’t know what the f*** they were doing. The consequent death toll gave rise to the journalistic concept of the “œvampire auto,” which basically meant a hit-and-run car.
Here are a couple of articles from the Chicago Tribune…
…and..
Makes me wonder if pedestrians of the time should have been carrying crosses, wooden stakes, or garlic.