VIDEO – My Strange Addiction: Vampire Edition

michelledrinkingblood

TLC’s My Strange Addiction is often hard to watch, but difficult to turn away from. They usually feature two people with odd and/or dangerous habits, most often eating something toxic like nail polish or deodorant. Sometimes it’s behaviors like getting coffee enemas or black market butt injections. Last night they devoted an entire episode to Michelle, who drinks a liter of blood a day, usually animal blood because she can’t get that much human blood.

The 29-year-old woman has been drinking blood for ten years, and has consumed almost 1000 gallons since she started. She buys most of her stash at a local market, which stocks frozen pig and cow’s blood, an ingredient some people use occasionally in cooking. She likes pig’s blood over cow’s blood because “it’s a little bit more salty than the beef blood. The consistency is like that of wine, it’s just slightly thicker. I doesn’t taste like wine, but it definitely has the same ambiance. When I feel it going down my throat it’s like having a cold and drinking a hot toddy.”


She only drinks animal blood, however, because it’s impossible for her get as much human blood as she want. “I drink human blood as much as I can. Everybody has their own flavor, their own taste.” Michelle also reports that men’s blood is thicker than women’s.

Michelle is seen on camera drinking blood from her friend Johnny’s arm. Michelle says she like sucking blood from the arms, legs, and back, but not from the neck because it’s too “cliche.” She also has an aversion to being called a vampire. “I do not want to categorize myself as a vampire. I’m simply somebody that enjoys blood. Quite a lot.”

Her friend Johnny on having his blood sucked:

“When I cut myself, the pain doesn’t really get to me. I’m pretty used to it, you know. I’m more focused on the aftermath, or during. The process of “the feeding,” if you will.”

She drinks from Johnny at least once a week, and he’s the only person she’s currently drinking from. She sets up the area with candles, and drinks for a few seconds to a five minutes. Johnny says it doesn’t hurt, but feels like someone giving you a hickey.

There are obvious dangers from drinking people’s blood, like contracting diseases like HIV and hepatitis, but Michelle doesn’t see it as too much of a danger. She says she makes her donors get tested before she drinks their blood unless they’re a really close friend. But even close friends have their own secrets, so she should probably get them tested too if she’s going to continue doing this.

How did this start?

She started drinking blood as a depressed teenager. She started cutting herself during a dark period in her life, and decided one day to taste the blood. As she says, she’s now been “tasting it ever since.”

Michelle stopped drinking her own blood when she overcame her depression because she now associates “personal self-mutilation with severe issues.”



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