A vampire is a mythical creature that subsists by feeding on the vital essence (mostly blood) of the living, mostly humans along with animals on occasion. In European folklore, they are undead creatures that often visited loved ones and cause mischief or deaths in the neighborhoods, which they inhabited while they were alive. Vampiric entities have been recorded in cultures around the world; the term was popularized in Western Europe after reports of an 18th Century mass hysteria of a preexisting folk belief in Southeastern and Eastern Europe that in some cases resulted in corpses being staked and people being accused of vampirism. Other depictions of vampires are that they are the result of a biological mutation (or virus) in human beings bitten by bats, whether rabid or not and possess certain abilities and traits that resemble, but are not identical to the supernatural kind, and are known as pseudo-vampires, or "living vampires."