Crime was rampant, murder was common, theft and larceny were commonplace and bizarrely there were also reports dating all the way back to 1969, of unexplained paranormal weather phenomena such as thunder and lightning occuring inside apartment buildings and this was also woefully unexplored by authorities.
It was certainly not a place or a time for sending your six year old daughter out to the corner store for a loaf of bread, a container of milk, and a stick of butter.
One small section of this ghoulish tapestry can be explained by the arrival of vampires to the Bronx. Although officially denied, there have been pieces of video footage which show at least one vampire interacting with children and other members of the community in the Bronx. I suppose when everything all around is going crazy, then what might usually be considered to be strange, just becomes boringly passé.
In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, in the words of Sir Winston Churchill, an Iron Curtain descended across eastern Europe. The countries on the dismal side of the Iron Curtain included Romania and like so many others, it too adopted a communist system of government.
During the late 1950's, with a system of policies not unlike the pogroms of Russia a century before and the systematic genocide of the Third Reich in the two decades before, the communist government of Romania decided to clear out the last remaining strongholds of werewolves and vampires which were still living in the Carpathian Mountains.
In this new period of borderline ethnic cleansing, the previous inhabitants of the Carpathian Mountains who were considered to be a scourge of terror, themselves became the subject of terror being exacted. Many werewolves and vampires fled Romania in the 1950s and this is why the Von Numerovski family fled to the United States.
Unlike previous pogroms (with one of the most famous being the period of the 1890s in which the Dracula family took up residence in London), the anti German sentiment coupled with a general sort of fear of communism, meant that the Von Numerovski family passed through Greece, Ireland and then the United States instead of entering the UK. The land of opportunity with Lady Liberty shining a light upon the Hudson River, welcomed many people escaping Eastern Europe and many people upon passing through Ellis Island, entered an entirely new life.
This is how the Von Numerovski family happened to purchase an apartment in the Bronx and how they were able to continue with their previous practices of vampirism without anyone knowing about it, for more than 40 years.
Even though the United States went through a period of post-war prosperity, various laws relating to rent control of housing and a general lack of maintenance in Brooklyn and the Bronx; coupled with a period of racial tensions, which all paralleled the civil rights movement and the geopolitical tensions relating to the Vietnam War, meant that that prosperity didn't quite visit some sections of New York City. There was a real irony that one of the richest cities in the world, also had some of the highest crime rates in the world as well.
This helps to explain why it wasn't until the mid 1990s, when the data in various archives was released, that anyone began to realise the kinds of horror that the Von Numerovski family had been able to perpetrate.
Being vampires with a penchant for feasting upon the blood of the living, the Von Numerovski family were responsible for the deaths of some 130 people it is estimated. None of these deaths went noticed amidst the background of a city riddled with crime and most of these deaths were attributed to either the results of violence or as being drug related.
In June of 1968, when Alphonse Von Numerovski XI died due to sun exposure, the title of Count Von Numerovski of Carpathia, Hepplemont and Löz, passed to his son Alphonse Von Numerovski XII. Of course such a title would have aroused suspicion at a time when Cold War tensions were escalating and so the younger Alphonse decided to go by the alias of Count Von Count.
The young Count, although a vampire, had not been fully apprenticed in the ways of vampirism owing to the disruption of his youth. Instead of hiding away from society, he moved out of the family home and bought his own apartment in the Bronx, at the address of 123 Sesame Street, Apartment 5A. The street had a bodega on the corner, a business which specialised in small appliance repair, and in an unexpected turn of events it had an eight foot tall pigeon who lived at the end of the block and he happened to claim to be best friends with someone imaginary.
The street also had a homeless person living on the street in a pile of rubbish, an incompetent transient worker who lived in the apartment next door with his mother, and various people who appeared to come from some alternative dimension and who were given the name of 'monsters' by the CIA.
Thus, Count Von Count was able to undertake his own apprenticeship in the ways of vampirism in relative impunity. It is really only fragments of newspaper articles when pieced together that begin to give you a glimpse of his reign of terror in the Bronx and the lower east side of Manhattan.
Quite apart from the sheer volume of mysterious deaths that occurred which were previously thought to be drug and violence related, was the strange practice of arranging of items on the front stoops of brownstones. New York City Police were baffled for years by arrangements of things with chalk numbers on the pavement which corresponded to the total of those arranged things. It is only when you realise that the legends surrounding vampires and the supposition that they have the condition called arithmomania (that is, a compulsion to count things), that it becomes apparent that this was a coping mechanism by the locals.
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