This is a True Story:

Eight months ago Clarice Porterville said she made the biggest mistake of her life: She married a vampire hoping to ‘change’ him.

Now she’s joined the ranks of the undead – converted by her bloodsucking husband.

‘My parents warned me not to go through with the marriage, my friends all warned me but I wouldn’t listen because I was madly in love.’

‘I thought love would conquer all, but I was wrong and I’ve paid a high price – my soul’.

Clarice, 28, of New Orleans, say she was swept of her feet when she first met handsome, black-garbed Dimitrie Barbu in the Big Easy.

‘He was suave, sophisticated, with a sexy foreign accent’, she said. ‘He said straight off that he was a vampire, but so many people in New Orleans are into that Gothic nonsense, I didn’t take him seriously.’

On another date Dimitrie demonstrated that he was no ordinary human.

‘At my apartment he levitated two feet off the floor’ she recalls.

Dimitrie claimed to be more than four hundred years old, a Romanian prince who had been converted to vampirism by a beautiful gypsy on Christmas Eve 1570.

‘After three weeks of dating he told me he loved me and that was the only thing giving him the will power not to bite me’.

Deeply moved, Clarice told Dimitrie she wanted to help him and, in what she now recognises was ‘an act of utter stupidity’ begged him to marry her.

‘I truly believed earnest prayer and the love of a good woman could turn him around,’ Clarice says. ‘I thought it would be like taking an alcoholic to an AA meeting’.

The two were wed under a full moon in February. Their agreement, Clarice says, was that Dimitrie wouldn’t drink her blood. But not long after their wedding night, he broke his vow and sank his fangs into her neck.

‘It was terrifying and yet intensely sensual at the same time’, recalls Clarice. ‘I could feel my life force leaving my body, but at the same time I didn’t want it to stop. I woke the next morning feeling drained and weak.

‘Every night for two weeks after that, he fed from me and every morning I woke feeling weaker’.

‘Then one morning I woke and bounced out of bed feeling really energetic. I told Dimitrie and he said that I’d ‘crossed over’ – I was a vampire.’

‘I told him he was crazy but within a few hours I was overcome by an irresistible thirst for human blood. I had to dine.’

‘There’s nothing glamorous about the vampire lifestyle’, reveals Clarice, ‘We’re always searching for blood. Sometimes we’re lucky and we’ll meet vampire groupies who donate willingly. More often we jump homeless men, prostitutes or other people I would never have even touched in the past.’

‘I just hope other people will learn from my mistake and not be led astray by sexually magnetic vampires’.