The Actual Vampire Lore Behind ‘Sesame Street’s Count von Count

Whatever you consider Sesame Street’s Count, man or monster, he’s got a simple mission: to count things. It is his drive, his base need, the source of his delightful full name: Count Von Count. Being familiar with the character, you probably saw the immediate wordplay of a Count who likes to count and thought, “Oh, that’s fun,” which is all that’s really needed for a children’s show. You might have also thought that the connection to counting ended there.

So did his creator, Norman Stiles. “That was really the key to making The Count work, because now it was, ‘He counts things,’ and counting things is an endless thing,” Stiles told Polygon. “His obsession with counting things gave him a kind of comedic power the same as Cookie Monster.” 

First, I’d like to acknowledge the borderline poetic punch of “counting things is an endless thing.” Boy, isn’t it. What Stiles might not have realized, and definitely should take full credit for whether he did or not, is that compulsive counting is actually part of legitimate vampire lore.

A less-known and less horror-movie centric bit of vampire canon is that they suffer from arithmomania, a form of obsessive-compulsive disorder that presents itself as a need to count objects in your surroundings. This crossed even cultural boundaries, with tales of number-crunching Counts existing from Slavic lore all the way to the Chinese jiangshi. 

As the lore goes, the vampires could be distracted from your pulsing, delectable carotids by a surplus of something in the surroundings that demanded to be counted. Holes in a fishing net, seed scattered at the door, Chinese folklore even recommended tossing out a handful of rice grains in front of a vampire as a functional defense against getting feasted on. 

Add in their distaste for garlic, and this does suggest that a messily eaten everything bagel is a vampire’s true greatest fear.