[2.04] How can one kill a vampyre?

Although it never a good practice to harm vampires (being a hunter won't get you any points on this newsgroup), let alone kill them, some of the more favored methods of destroying a vampire include:

Stake
- Immobilized/destroyed by driving a stake through the heart. Some legends say the stake must be of a particular type of wood (generally ash, hawthorn, maple, blackthorn, buckthorn, or aspen), and some say that the stake must be driven through in one, continuous, blow.

Beheading
- Cutting off the vampire's head. Some legends say this must be done with a grave digger's shovel. The two above things, cutting off the head and using a stake, have a common origin in the belief that the brain and the heart were the seats of life and power in living things. If you put a piece of wood through the heart, there is a good chance that you're going to kill whatever it is. Also, if you cut off a vampire's head, you are cutting it's brain off from the rest of its body, therefore, you are cutting it off from its life-force.

Burning
- Burning the vampire. This seems to be a relatively universal method of destroying vampires, in both legend and fiction.

Remove the heart
- Cutting out the heart and burning it.

Faith
- Dispelling the vampire with holy symbols and/or water. This idea seems to have come about through Christian beliefs, because vampires were postulated by Leo Allatius, and later by Dom Augustin Calmet, to be somehow related to Satan. One further method of dispelling or harming vampires was by use of the Eucharistic Wafer (the bread used in Holy Communion, which is believed to be mystically transformed by blessing, into the actual flesh of Christ). Today, with the characterizations of vampires, given by modern writers, this belief is not widely utilized. (See also question [2.07])

It should be kept in mind that, although these practices are supposed to harm a vampire, they also tend to put a hurting on mortals as well. As a result, any attempts made in the early years of human lore to destroy vampires by these methods were pretty well guaranteed to work... Make what you will from that.

-Sunlight
-Piercing with a sword: A blessed sword should be used
-Immersing in water
-Drenching in Garlic and holy water: Large amount to be hauled to the gravestone to assure a good kill.
-Magic
- Dhampir

*edited to remove duplicates

you're supposed to behead them and then burn the carcass and scatter the ashes so they cannot reform again. but that is assuming they are immortal. a quick stake through the heart should be enough for almost anyone... vampire or not.

for connecticut vampires.

while they are sleeping (usually in the grave)
-take their head off
-burn them
-mix your blood with the ashes
-mix it with water and drink it
-re burry them with their head facing down
-put the arms where their legs were and legs where their arms were.

I love living in CT yippy.

I'd think decapitation would be good enough for me.

I am glad not to be the only person here to have noticed that most of the ways listed to kill a Vampire would kill anyone. Immersion in water (that is drowning no?)

Also StormCrow, it seems quite a long drawn out process to kill a Vampire in Connecticut. By the time you have managed to arrange everything and get it all prepared even a Vampire could have died of old age!

Velvet Darkness

True, all of these options for killing a vampire will no doubt kill a human, or non-vampire. Most of these options are as old as the stories in which they appear, is there any merit in thinking up new, original and interesting ways to slay a vampire. Although slaying the figure head of so many good moves, books and musical literature is a terrible and peverse thing to do, why is there no elegance and thought behind said slaying.

A stake to the heart? How blazzay ((excuse the bad spelling))

But that is just my thought on the subject.

You can't . . . the Vampyre is already dead!

Firstly the mentioned methods have been 'solutions' handed down over ages long since passed. Just to prove my point, cases of vampire-slayings in the USA in the late 1800s where no different than the doing away with of patients of tuberculosis (whose syptoms resemble those of a vampire-bitten person such as going pale, worsening condition in the night etc).

Secondly, and no offence to the people who have posted, but you speak of slaying as if you have done it yourself with the same surety as you list the different methods.

So, my questions to them are.
1) where have you heard of these methods? Is it directly from someone who has practiced these methods effectively or from vampire literature, or god-forbid over the internet?

2) Have you slain a vampire yourself ?

In my opinion, vampires are human beings..alive not dead, and can be killed in the same ways that you and me can be killed (though i have no idea why you would want to kill a vampire)

I remember hearing as a child that in the olden days (in Romania I think), when people thought that a corpse would rise from the grave they would fill the coffin with seeds, the idea was that vampires would feel the compulsion to count them all and if enough were present then it wouldn't have time to finish counting them before the sun rose.

Another method was to burry the coffin lid down, doesn't really seem feasable to me seeing as how the lid is nailed as securely as the base and there's still six feet of earth to dig through.

Also placing a sharpened sickle of other blade securely across the corpses neck, in this way should the corpse try to move it would either be decapitated or forced to remain still for eternity.

Sorry but I can't remember the sources for these.