WARNING: This article may be disturbing to some readers. It contains true stories and graphic descriptions of real cannibalism.

The Zombies Have Finally Arrived Replacing Those Pesky Vampires and Serial Killers: Is The Entertainment Media To Blame? ...by Bill Knell

Every few years someone plays a practical joke on drivers by hacking into those flashing electronic highway warning signs with messages like: "WARNING: Zombies ahead." Now it seems those pranksters may be right! Recent crimes have given me pause to wonder if the Zombies have arrived and are beginning to take things over. Recent crimes may prove we have been invaded by those flesh-eating stiffs or their ghoulish human counterparts.

A Canadian porn actor named Luka Rocco Magnotta is wanted for recently killing Jun Lin, a Chinese student who was attending Concordia University in Montreal. He not only killed Lin, but videotaped himself repeatedly stabbing the Chinese national and dismembering him. Reports from Montreal say that Magnotta mailed some of Lin's body parts to Canadian Politicians and may have eaten others.

Just last month another man named Rudy Eugene stripped naked on one side of the Miami Herald newspaper building and attacked Ronald Poppo. Video cameras captured the horrific crime and onlookers were horrified to see that Eugene was actually eating Poppo's face. He ate the man's nose, ears and eyes. When Police arrived on the scene Eugene growled at them like a dog and continued his mission of cannibalistic carnage until they were forced to shoot him.

Less than two weeks after that incident a man named Alexander Kinyua of Joppatowne, Maryland, was turned into Police by his brother who believed that Alexander had killed and partially eaten his housemate. Kinyua's brother discovered what he believed to be human remains that looked as though they had been chewed-on in the basement of his father's home. When he asked Alexander about them, he said they were just animal remains. However, when Kinyua's housemate turned up missing, Police investigated and charged Alexander with murder. It was later discovered that the suspect had eaten his housemate's heart and part of his brain.

Over the Memorial Day (2012) weekend a New Jersey man named Wayne Carter started acting strange, threatening to harm himself with a knife. By the time Police arrived he had already began to cut himself open. After cutting out his entrails, he threw them at Police along with other pieces of flesh that he cut cut from other parts of his body. Pepper spray had no effect on Carter, so a S.W.A.T. team was called in to subdue him. He somehow survived all the self-inflicted carnage and was taken to a hospital.

As if all this wasn't enough, a woman named Otty Sanchez called "a sweet person" by her boyfriend was recently arrested for killing and eating her baby. Police were horrified when they responded to a call about a a disturbance at the Sanchez home only to find her baby Scott be-headed and partially eaten by his mother. Otty Sanchez was discovered sitting on her couch making bizarre sounds and speaking incoherently. She had a number of self-inflicted wounds and later told authorities that she had been hearing voices that ordered her to kill and eat her offspring. Two other children in the home were unharmed.

Are these crimes copycat incidents by people that have watched too many Zombie films or left the TV on while they were sleeping only to have episodes of 'The Walking Dead' leave somnambulistic suggestions buried deep inside their unconscious mind? I don't have the answer to that, but this is not the first time that a disturbing trend of gruesome murders might be able to be traced back to what people have read about, heard on records, watched on TV or seen in movies.

During the late 1960s the infamous Manson Family murders in California were said to have been inspired by messages that cult leader Charles Manson derived from listening to record albums by The Beatles. At the time of the murders in 1969, the fab four boy band from Liverpool, England, were no longer recording feel good tunes like 'All My Loving' or 'I Wanna Hold Your Hand'. Instead they were offering up more somber titles that included 'Helter Skelter' and 'Piggies' which Manson said were messages that ordered him to try and ignite some sort of an apocalyptic war between the races and social classes.

. Not to be out done by zombies or personality cult serial killers, vampire wannabees have certainly left their mark on more than a few police blotters around the world and may have been egged on by their ficticious un-dead counterparts. The vicious vampire flicks that hit theaters from the 1970s to the 1990s had to have left a deep impression on at least a few disturbed people. Those films have since found vibrant second lives on cable TV. Unlike the present crop of sexy vampires who only drink pig's blood, kill the baddies, or kill to eat rather than live their un-dead lives to kill, those guys were downright mean and may have inspired a number of crimes including a very high profile case from the 1990s.

In 1996 a group of teens from Murray, Kentucky, that called themselves a 'vampire clan' committed a series of crimes beginning with the horrific Thanksgiving Week murders of Naoma Ruth and Richard Wendorf. The leader of that 'clan' was a guy named Rod Ferrell who ordered that a 'V' be burned into the bodies of his victims. He was eventually arrested and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole (probably a good thing).

There are many other famous 'vampire' inspired killers like Tsutomu Miyazaki of Japan who killed four little girls between 1989-1990 and drank their blood. Philip Onyancha of Kenya killed and drank the blood of at least seventeen known victims. Richard Chase of California murdered six people in the late 1970s because of an alleged lust and craving for human blood. Joshua Rudiger ran around San Francisco in 1998 claiming to be a two thousand year old vampire. He slashed the throats of several people, drank their blood and killed a woman before police caught up to him and the list could go on.

I am still not sure if the Zombies are invading and taking over, but I think that people who see their friends or relatives acting strangely or becoming obsessed with bizarre cultic or fictional character lifestyles should take every action possible to prevent them from hurting themselves or others. It takes a village to keep the zombie, vampire and cult threats among us at bay.