A woman in Tennessee named Jade Dodd has been getting out ahead of a story that reveals, undoubtedly, that she’s a vampire. This fiendish bloodsucker recently had her driver’s license renewed online and was, as she claims, surprised when what came in the mail was a new card with a photo of an empty chair instead of her face.
While networks like CNN are gullible enough to run bemused segments that take Dodd at her word, we at The A.V. Club remember the lessons taught to us by Van Helsing, Buffy, and Guillermo: There are vampires everywhere, and only constant vigilance will protect us from these spawns of Satan. Dodd says that the license was simply a mistake. We know the truth. She was sitting in that chair, had her picture taken, and didn’t show up in it because, as we all know, vampires are real, cannot be photographed, and she’s one of them.
“The lady at the DMV did not really believe me when I was like ‘hey, I need my license fixed because it just has a chair on it,” Dodd tells CNN in an interview shot, presumably, just after she’d wiped the blood from her mouth to make a more convincing case. Obviously helpless to resist the vampiric hypnosis she’d cast over them, a DMV spokesperson has tried to downplay the incident, saying that the mistake is due to an employee “accidentally [taking] a picture of an empty chair” and saving it to Dodd’s profile when she first got her license, years ago.
What Dodd and the DMV claim is comforting. It turns this story into something funny—an amusing mishap that we can laugh at before going on with our day. But know that it isn’t the truth. Vampires are far more cunning than werewolves, goblins, Sasquatch, chupacabra, living mummies, and lake monsters—all of which are also real and walking among us—and they will try to deceive their prey any way they can. The only hope we have is to keep an eye on them when they accidentally reveal themselves through acts of hubris like getting a driver’s license that, really, isn’t even necessary when they can already travel by turning into mist or bats.
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