Strange Tales of Real Immortals

Human kind, indeed, all living things have always been tethered to aging and death. For all of our mastery of technology and medical knowledge, it is an inevitable, inescapable fate for us to grow old and die. For thousands of years, there have been those who would avert this creeping certainty of aging, who would break the cycle of deterioration, death, and decay. The quest for a way to remain young forever has consumed mankind throughout history, and if some stories are to be believed, there are those among us who have managed to achieve this. 

One such strange, supposedly immortal individual called New Orleans his home in the early 1900s, and by some accounts was more than merely an eccentric, but also an immortal vampire. The setting for this odd tale is the city of New Orleans, Louisiana, in the early 1900s, when one day a mysterious stranger came to town to take up residence at an opulent home at 1039 Royal Street. The stranger called himself Jacques St. Germain and immediately made an indelible impression with his dashing good looks, charming demeanor, and obvious wealth. Indeed, he was known to splash about money as if it were nothing to him and came to be known for holding lavish parties at his luxurious home, where he would entertain high society’s rich and elite. It was not long before this stranger was the talk of the town, yet no one really had any idea of where he had come from, nor much about him at all other than that he spoke both French, English, and Spanish fluently, and that he was well-traveled, talking excitedly of his trips to far-flung places throughout the world but giving very little personal information about himself. 

It didn’t seem to matter, though, as the handsome socialite was so rich and charming, beguiling even, that people overlooked it. As time went on, Jacque’s eccentricities began to come through. He was rarely seen during daylight hours, and it was noticed that during his conversations, he would often slip into talking about events in the far past with such familiarity and with such a sentimental cast to his expression that it gave people the unsettling feeling that he had actually been present at these events, despite them lying sometimes centuries in the past. He also began to make bold claims that he was a direct descendant of the late Comte de St. Germain, who was a mysterious European adventurer, philosopher, and prominent member of high society in the 1700s, as well as a personal friend and diplomat of King Louis the XV.

This was all taken with a grain of salt, and most took it to be said in jest, merely entertaining banter, but there were others who noticed that Jacques actually did bear a striking resemblance to Comte de St. Germain, and seemed to behave very much the same as well. Rumors began to swirl, and before long, there were whispers that not only was Jacques related to Comte de St. Germain, but that they were one in the same, this even though he had died in 1784. Nevertheless, there was speculation that Jacques had somehow achieved immortality, an idea bolstered by the fact that Comte de St. Germain was often said to be immortal, always appearing to be around the same age in all of his portraits, about 40, which was incidentally the same age as the mysterious Jacques, and he had been sighted throughout the centuries looking as young as ever.

On top of all of his other idiosyncrasies and his uncanny resemblance to his claimed ancestor, this led to suspicion that Jacques was perhaps actually an immortal, and had merely changed his identity from Comte de St. Germain upon moving to New Orleans. This was bolstered by the fact that Comte de St. Germain had often made bold claims that he was hundreds of years old and had found an elixir of everlasting life, on top of other bold and mysterious proclamations, with the famous Italian author, adventurer, and great historical womanizer Giacomo Girolamo Casanova himself once writing of Comte St. Germain in his memoir, thus:

“This extraordinary man, intended by nature to be the king of impostors and quacks, would say in an easy, assured manner that he was three hundred years old, that he knew the secret of the Universal Medicine, that he possessed a mastery over nature, that he could melt diamonds, professing himself capable of forming, out of ten or twelve small diamonds, one large one of the finest water without any loss of weight. All this, he said, was a mere trifle to him. Notwithstanding his boastings, his bare-faced lies, and his manifold eccentricities, I cannot say I thought him offensive. In spite of my knowledge of what he was and in spite of my own feelings, I thought him an astonishing man as he was always astonishing me.”

Another oddity that Jacques shared with Comte de St. Germain was that, although he threw decadent feasts and seemed to revel in people gorging themselves on food in his presence, he never seemed to actually eat anything himself. He was said to merely talk and observe, sometimes drinking from a chalice of wine, but never actually eating any of the food on display. This oddly mirrors an unusual observation made of Comte de St. Germain by Casanova, who said of him:

“The most enjoyable dinner I had was with Madame de Robert Gergi, who came with the famous adventurer, known by the name of the Count de St. Germain. This individual, instead of eating, talked from the beginning of the meal to the end, and I followed his example in one respect as I did not eat, but listened to him with the greatest attention. It may safely be said that as a conversationalist he was unequalled.”

All of this led to people half-jokingly suggesting that Jacques was not only immortal and actually Comte de St. Germain, but possibly even a vampire, although some people seem to have steadily grown to accept this as more than just a joke. Jacques St. Germain, of course, got wind of the rumors and seemed to get great amusement from it, enjoying stoking the gossip by neither admitting nor denying anything. It all seemed like a game to him, and only served to fuel the fires of the rumors.

This might have been where the whole story ended, with Jacques St. Germain merely remembered as an eccentric, rich playboy, if it weren’t for an odd incident that struck a few months after coming to New Orleans. One evening, a woman was witnessed dropping to the street from one of St. Germain’s upper-floor windows, with onlookers saying she had jumped. The woman, a prostitute, survived the fall but was described as being absolutely terrified by something she had seen up in that house. Things got even stranger when she was questioned by police, during which time she claimed that the reason she had jumped was that St. Germain had tried to ferociously bite her neck, causing her to fight him off with all of her might and fly into a panic, jumping out of that window to escape.

Despite this rather dramatic testimony, St. Germain laughed it off, and was a well-respected member of high society by that time, and the police told him that everything could be worked out the following morning. No one thought at all that he could have been guilty of what he was accused of, and it was thought that the woman, a lowly prostitute in their eyes, was on drugs or insane. The authorities explained to him that his coming in for questioning was merely a formality and that everything would quickly be sorted out. St. Gemain then pleasantly and politely accepted, wished the officers a good evening, and closed the door. It would be the last anyone ever saw of him.

When the next morning came around, the police patiently waited for St. Germain to arrive, but he never did. Still not thinking him guilty of anything other than a poor choice of prostitutes, they nevertheless went to his residence to see what was going on. The house was found to still hold most of St. Germain’s belongings, large amounts of valuables, and all of his furniture. The second floor of the residence was supposedly murky and heavily curtained, and as the police pushed into the gloom, they allegedly made a macabre discovery of numerous bottles containing a mixture of wine and human blood. Of the missing St. Germain, there was no sign, and he would indeed never be seen again, disappearing into the night to leave raging rumors and all of that blood behind.

With this strange and rather grim discovery, coupled with the sudden and mysterious disappearance of Jacques St. Germain, the rumors of immortality and vampires quickly went from a sort of joke to very serious indeed, and the legend took off as those who had looked at these ideas with skepticism suddenly were faced with the realization that something very weird was going on indeed. People were now convinced that not only were Comte St. Germain and Jacques St. Germain the same, but that he was an actual, real-life vampire.

Many things went into such wild reasoning. Why did they look so exactly alike? Indeed, there were also many similarities in both their personas and demeanors. Both were eccentric, rich ladies' men with a penchant for engaging conversation and spinning fantastical yarns, and both were well-learned world travelers. It seemed too much to be a coincidence. Why was he seen almost always in the evening hours, and why was he never seen eating anything at his own luscious feasts? How was it that he knew such details about events hundreds of years before, and why did he speak of these things as if he were there seeing them with his own eyes? Why was he so secretive with his personal information, and most importantly of all, why did he have bottles and bottles of blood in a darkened room? No one had a clue, but it all added up to paint a very odd picture.

This theory was further fueled by the fact that, although Comte de St. Germain is considered to have been a real person, his actual history is rather murky and ill-defined, making him quite the mysterious figure indeed, ripe for fitting him into all of the madness. Very little is known about the man himself, where he came from, or even when and where he was born, or what his true name really was. This is partly because he changed identities and titles so often, but also because he was a social chameleon and considered to be a very skilled and accomplished liar in all things. One Lady Jemima Yorke once said of him.

“He is an Odd Creature, and the more I see him the more curious I am to know something about him. He is everything with everybody: he talks Ingeniously with Mr Wray, Philosophy with Lord Willoughby, and is gallant with Miss Yorke, Miss Carpenter, and all the Young Ladies. But the Character and Philosopher is what he seems to pretend to, and to be a good deal conceited of: the Others are put on to comply with Les Manieres du Monde, but that you are to suppose his real characteristic; and I can't but fancy he is a great Pretender in All kinds of Science, as well as that he really has acquired an uncommon Share in some.”

Put this all together, and it is very difficult to pin down any concrete information on him at all, making him almost like a literary character rather than a real person, and allowing people, in retrospect, to make up all kinds of wild tales about him as they see fit. There were also the many accounts of Comte de St. Germain being very skilled in many areas of the arts and sciences, far beyond what would be expected from someone having lived only one lifetime, his declaring himself to be hundreds of years old, as well as much testimony that he was an actual alchemist. There are quite a few unverified accounts of him turning metal to gold or creating perfect diamonds from impure ones, and even when he was officially alive, there were rumors that he had used these powers to prolong his own life, perhaps indefinitely. Indeed, there were many who claimed that over the years, he had not noticeably aged at all. 

This caused rumors that he had never really died at all, only moving on to take on another identity, perhaps even to New Orleans. Combine this with the enigmatic nature of Jacques St. Germain, all of the striking similarities, the mysterious crime, and his subsequent vanishing, as well as the bottles of blood, and you have a perfect storm for the creation of an eerie legend. Now it is quite possible that Jacques St. Germain was just what he seemed to be, merely an odd, rich fellow, nocturnal because of his hard-partying lifestyle, and that he had certain kinks, such as biting women’s necks and drinking wine mixed with blood, his freak flag flying high. Maybe he was afraid that he would be arrested, and that was why he skipped town, and his resemblance to Comte St. Germain was just a coincidence, but where’s the fun in that? Stories of ancient immortals and vampires are much more interesting, and this has caused the legend to grow.

In the end, although it is all a fascinating story, there is little to actually verify or substantiate any of it, which has indeed allowed it to become the pervasive legend it is today. Everything else has been obscured by murky history and countless retellings, making the truth evasive. The only thing we really know for sure is that both of these men were real and that they shared many similarities in both appearance and character. Other than that, we are left to wonder just who Comte de St. Germain really was and what connection he had to the mysterious Jacques St. Germain, if any. This probably is all merely a coincidence and misunderstanding colored by exaggeration, misinterpretation, and myth-making, but what if there really was an ageless vampire who made his way from the Old World to the New, to come calling at New Orleans? What if Comte de St. Germain really was an immortal, whether because of being a vampire or through some magical elixir of life? What if he is still out there now?

Another tale orbiting the topic of immortals is that of the seemingly mythical Fountain of Youth. The search for eternal youth and a fountain of youth is a frequent fixture of various myths and legends from around the world. One of the earliest accounts of such a place comes from the 5th century BC, when the Greek historian Herodotus wrote of a fountain in the land of the Macrobians, which gave the people of the region exceptionally long life spans. In the 3rd century AD, Alexander the Great was said to have searched for a fountain of youth, allegedly crossing a mythical land covered in eternal night called The Land of Darkness to reach it. The legendary Christian patriarch and king, Prester John, allegedly ruled over a land containing a similar fountain during the early Crusades in the 11th and 12th centuries AD. In Japan, stories of hot springs that can heal wounds and restore youth were also common and still are to this day.

During the Age of Exploration, when European global exploration took off in the 15th century AD, interest in such a mythical fountain of youth had not waned. The New World of the Americas began to be seen as a potential location for a fountain of eternal youth. The Caribbean, in particular, was considered a prime candidate, as many islanders spoke of a lost land of wealth and prosperity known as Bimini, which became entwined with the legend of a fountain of youth. The Fountain of Youth was a hot topic in those days. The Spanish historian, Lopez de Gomara, wrote of Indian accounts of a magical river, waterfall, or spring that could reverse aging and could be found in the lands north of Cuba and Haiti. Pietro Martire d’Anghiera, an Italian geographer living in Spain, in 1513 wrote of the fountain as well, saying:

“Among the islands of the north side of Hispaniola, about 325 leagues distant, as said by those who have searched for it, is a continual spring of flowing water of such marvelous virtue that the water thereof being drunk, perhaps with some diet, maketh old men young again”

During this era of exploration of the New World, it was indeed the Spanish who took a particular interest in such a mystical spring, after hearing widespread talk of Bimini and fountains of restorative waters from the Arawaks in Hispaniola, Cuba, and Puerto Rico. Florida was a land of many natural springs, and it was thought that one of these was the mystical Fountain of Youth of local legend.”

One name that has become inextricably linked to the quest for the Fountain of Youth is that of the Spanish explorer and conquistador Juan Ponce de León, who was the first governor of Puerto Rico and, in 1513, led the first European expeditions into what would become Florida. It was alleged that during his explorations of Florida, while looking to find lost gold and claim land for Spain, the explorer had the ulterior motive of finding the lost land of Bimini and thus the Fountain of Youth, which he was convinced existed. It was claimed that during his forays into Florida, the explorer would unofficially go off with a small contingent of men in an effort to locate the fountain.

Although Ponce de León became connected to and perhaps best known for his quest for the Fountain of Youth, it has long been debated as to just how much fact there is to this story. One of the problems lies in the fact that there are virtually no surviving records of the expeditions to Florida written by Ponce de León himself, and the fountain is not mentioned in any that do exist. Most accounts that we now have were actually written long after his death by native arrow in 1521. Nevertheless, historical references to the explorer’s obsession with the mythical fountain abound. One of the best sources of information on Ponce de León’s travels and search for the fountain is the writings of Antonio de Herrera y Tordesillas, who was the Chief Historian of the Indies in 1596. Amongst his accounts, Herrera wrote in his impressively titled record, Historia general de los hechos de los Castellanos en las islas y tierra firme del Mar Oceano, of Ponce de León’s quest:

“Juan Ponce overhauled his ships, and although it seemed to him that he had worked hard he decided to send out a ship to identify the Isla de Bimini even though he did not want to, for he wanted to do that himself. He had an account of the wealth of this island (Bimini) and especially that singular Fountain that the Indians spoke of, that turned men from old men into boys. He had not been able to find it because of the shoals and currents and contrary weather. He sent, then, Juan Pérez de Ortubia as captain of the ship and Antón de Alaminos as pilot. They took two Indians to guide them over the shoals… The other ship arrived and reported that Bimini had been found, but not the Fountain."

This seems intriguing, but considering that it was written over 70 years after the explorer’s death, one has to wonder how much veracity the account holds. This information could have been hearsay, and was probably second or third-hand information at best. An even earlier account in 1535, closer to Ponce de León’s death, was written by a court chronicler by the name of Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, in his book Historia General y Natural de las Indias, in which he mentions the explorer going off looking for the fountain using information gathered from the natives of the area. Oviedo’s report is difficult to take at face value for several reasons. It is said that the chronicler did not like Ponce de León and wrote the account in a way that suggests the explorer was trouncing off on a fool’s errand. In short, it is believed that the whole story written by Oviedo was an attempt to gain favor with the courts and was a political attack designed to discredit Ponce de León and basically make him look like an idiot. Oviedo even went as far as to suggest that Ponce de León’s quest for the fountain was part of a misguided attempt to cure his sexual impotency. Ouch. The political animosity between the two was understandable, since Oviedo was in with Diego Columbus, who had helped to push Ponce de León out of Puerto Rico and just so happened to be the son of none other than Christopher Columbus. Due to this underlying rivalry, it is hard to know how reliable Oviedo’s account is.

Other historical accounts also make mention of Ponce de León’s quest for the Fountain of Youth. In Francisco López de Gómara's Historia General de las Indias of 1551, the author describes Ponce de León’s search for the fountain. In 1575, the author Hernando D'Escalante Fontaneda wrote in his memoir that the Fountain of Youth was located in Florida and that the Spanish explorer had gone looking for it there. Fontaneda claimed to have been a prisoner of local natives for 17 years as a boy, and described the Indians as making use of a lost river that contained curative water, which he says Ponce de León was looking to find. Fontaneda’s account has a very skeptical feel to it, and the author seems to doubt that finding the fountain was the explorer’s first priority.

Although there is a certain romantic element to the idea of Ponce de León going off in search of fabled lands and mystical springs in the jungles of ancient Florida, it is uncertain if it ever happened at all. In the end, we are left with scattered historical documents that were written after Ponce de León’s death and none of which were written by the explorer himself, leaving his true intent and what really happened lost to the mists of time.

This uncertainty regarding the historical quest for the Fountain of Youth has not stopped the legend from enduring. Some even claim that the explorer was successful in his mission, indeed, possibly still alive somewhere out there, enjoying his perpetual youth. To this day, there is a spring said to be the actual one that Ponce de León was searching for in St. Augustine, Florida, which is said to be the oldest city in the U.S. The Fountain of Youth Archaeological Park in St. Augustine has become a popular tourist destination, where visitors can drink cups of water from the fabled spring. The park has seen various important archeological finds, such as an ancient cemetery and the ruins of missions dating back to the city’s founding. Although the site undoubtedly has historical value, the elderly people who come to visit in droves have yet to miraculously regain their youth, and it is doubtful if Ponce de León ever even set foot in St. Augustine.

Whether Ponce de León ever really did search for the Fountain of Youth, there have nevertheless been stories over the years of those who have claimed to have found it. In 1989, the author Charlie Carlson allegedly interviewed a man who claimed to be a member of a secret society that had located the Fountain of Youth and was tasked with protecting it. The interviewee claimed to be 93 years old, whereas Carlson described him as looking around 40. The man claimed that the fountain had been found sometime before 1845 and that it was his society’s duty to make sure that it remained secret from the world. This anonymous informant reportedly offered proof to back up his claims in the form of census records for all of the members who had lived past 110 years old, of which there were quite a few. Some had apparently lived to be up to 122 years old while appearing to be much younger. Although many had died in accidents such as drowning, against which the magical waters offered no protection, not a single one was found to have died of old age. Is there really a secret cabal of immortals out there who have drunk from the fountain and have pledged to eternally hide its secret? Nobody knows.

While in modern days it will likely be genetics and stem cells that lead to prolonged life, mankind’s quest for immortality is not new and has taken many forms through the centuries, with various elixirs, magical charms, and famous artifacts such as the Philosopher’s Stone all reputed to grant everlasting life. Perhaps in the case of Florida's Fountain of Youth, there may be such a place tucked away among the many springs that are to be found here. Whether it is there or not, it is intriguing to imagine such wonders, and there will be those who will search no matter what, enamored with the notion that it could be possible to live forever if only they could find it. Maybe there are even those who already have.

Lying off the southernmost point of Europe is the tiny, picturesque Greek island of Gavdos. It is an isolated speck of land jutting out of the Libyan Sea near its larger brother Crete, only about 30 square kilometers in size and sparsely populated, with more goats meandering around than people, all surrounded by azure waters inhabited by dolphins and myriad sea life. It is a place of stunning beauty and has been a magnet for people looking to get away from society and immerse themselves in this dream-like place. It is also the home of a mysterious group of people who claim immortality, and go about their enigmatic business amid the breathtaking scenery, far from prying eyes. In Greece, this has become a place of mystery and is known as the haunt of a secretive cabal of immortals.

To understand how this came to be, we have to go back to an at first seemingly unrelated and tragic event in history. One of the worst nuclear plant disasters ever recorded in history occurred in Ivankiv Raion, of northern Kiev Oblast, Ukraine, in the city of Pripyat, in what was at the time the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic of the Soviet Union, near the border with Belarus. It was here where on 26 April 1986, a catastrophic nuclear accident occurred at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, which would claim the lives of 31 people, plus many more in later years, send radioactive material spewing all over the western USSR and Europe, clear the immediate region of most of its inhabitants, affect nearly 7 million people, and cause environmental and health problems that still echo through and affect the area today. Among all of the human suffering and trying to piece together what happened, many people were left sick and aimless, and one of these was a man only known as Andrei.

Andrei had been a nuclear physicist in his past life before all of this, sent to Chernobyl in the aftermath of the catastrophe to do research. Unfortunately for him, he got very sick from the considerable radiation there in that forsaken place, finding himself in a facility full of moaning, dying people like him. Death was everywhere at the time, hanging over everything like a black fog, and Andrei knew that no amount of medical care or medicine was going to help him. He had an epiphany and realized that the only way to beat this condition was to turn to other means. At first, this involved simply moving away to a rural village and living a simple life of work, sweat, and drinking lots of vodka, all of which he would claim helped flush out the toxins from his system, and then his mind turned to more esoteric means of extending his life and indeed achieving immortality. He began to gather about him a following of others like him, many of them other Russian scientists and colleagues, and they began to study philosophy and esotericism to form a way of thinking in which hard work and a tough mind could alter the abilities of their own bodies through sheer will. They believed that through willpower, meditation, and shucking off our traditional ideas on life and death, we can essentially reprogram our physical bodies to never die.

After 10 years of this, the group had grown to around 30 members, and it was decided that they needed a place where they could live away from the world to pursue their way of life, and they found it on the island of Gavdos. In the late 1990s, they relocated to the island, which at the time had only a transient population of dreamers, drifters, artists, and hippies, and set up a sort of self-sufficient commune, growing their own food and living off the land. They also built mysterious laboratories where they went about experiments, even at the same time that they performed rituals or ceremonies, all shrouded in secrecy and mystery, their ultimate goal -- immortality. They believe that through their various activities, they can reach the next stage of human evolution, in which life eternal is possible, and it would be only the world and them. One of the members of the commune has ominously explained, “There won't be any new generations. We are the last generation. We won't permit the birth of people who are mortals. They are not needed.”

As soon as the group arrived, which is actually usually referred to as simply “The Group” or “The Russians,” they immediately began gathering an air of mystique and legend about them. Rumors began to fly about, all fueled by the group’s secrecy and the strange structures they built, such as a large, green pyramid that sits among the scrub and foraging goats like some inscrutable ruin from an ancient civilization. Another is a building built in the style of an ancient Greek temple covered with cryptic glyphs, which was erected much to the chagrin of the other islanders. People began talking about how this mysterious group would perform miracles around the island and demonstrate magical feats, or how they were building an underwater tunnel that would lead to Libya. One resident gives an anecdote of the group’s strange powers:

“One day, someone from the neighboring village asked us to help them move a heavy tree trunk. Six of us tried to get the piece into his truck, in vain. Then, two really skinny men came. They just said, ‘OK, let's do this.' And they did.”

There are so many stories and rumors that it is hard to know where any real facts end and fantasy begins. Norwegian filmmaker Yiorgos Moustakis, who has made a documentary on the island and its mysterious group, has said of these rumors:

“Many urban legends surrounded this group. Some thought that they came to this island to get cured from radiation. Others were saying that they are spies working for the KGB or CIA, working on a top-secret program. Most of these stories were told by people who had already met them and had seen their constructions around the island.”

Although their exact methods for achieving their goals are not clearly known, it is mostly thought that the group’s ideology is a sort of hodgepodge mix of simple living, magical ceremonies and rituals, religion, esoteric philosophies, and scientific experiments and research, through which they aim to reprogram the human body and reach the immortality they think resides within us all. To them, death is not inevitable, and it can be warded off or even stopped. The members themselves are very cryptic and secretive about it all, with one commune member explaining in an interview with Worldcrunch:

“Our bodies present so many possibilities of change that we don't use. Why? Because we create a lifestyle in which change isn't needed: a dead world that viciously influences us and turns us into dead people. We think that is the true fundamental reason for death, the starting point of what we call psychological destruction. I used to work in a research center, and I saw my whole future ahead of me. I realized it was controlling me and driving me towards a certain kind of death. So I decided to change course, to not follow that path and to create a different way of life for myself."

Just how they exactly plan to do this is murky, although many people have tried to figure it out, and there were even supposedly intelligence agents who have tried to infiltrate the group to find what they are up to, without much success. The closest anyone has come is perhaps the filmmaker Moustakis, who believes that the group, which it must remember is composed mostly of former scientists, is not quacks or religious nutjobs and that they know what they are doing. He has said of this:

“It is a huge study. The proof you are asking lies inside this study in the same way that the proof of, let's say, Einstein's relativity theory lies in the maths. In the case of the relativity theory, of course, it was experimentally proven later on in labs–the CERN accelerator, etc. But first, before this theory was tested in practice, it needed a working theoretical framework. To put it another way, yes, [the scientists] definitely have a theoretical framework that works.”

What is this mysterious group up to out there? What secrets have they found, if any? Mysterious groups like this have always been attracted to stories of the bizarre, and they often sort of become larger than life, to the point where it is hard to disentangle fact from fiction. Whatever they are up to and whoever they are, they still seem to manage to keep their secrets out on that little island surrounded by deep blue seas, and depending on how successful they have been, perhaps they always will.

Are any of these stories true? Are there people out there who have somehow managed to cheat death and escape its inexorable approach? How much truth do these stories hold, and where does reality begin and fantasy end? Whatever the case may be, it all shows that people are, and probably will always be, interested in the alluring idea of somehow avoiding the inevitable approach of death.