There’s no doubt that Harriett Chalmers Adams, pictured in the Gobi Desert above and in a portrait below, was a woman ahead of her time, a bold explorer who risked life and limb in search of knowledge. But I wouldn’t say all her reconnaissance was trustworthy. During a 1918 trip through South America, she believed she encountered actual vampires, which may have been really large bats or Peruvian guys wearing capes. From the August 12, 1918 edition of the New York Times:

“Mrs. Harriett Chalmers Adams, woman explorer of South America, and the wife of Franklin Adams of the Pan-American Union, has returned to Washington from another trip to hitherto unknown parts of South America. She has now traveled more than 40,000 miles on that continent. Speaking of her experiences, she says:

‘I have gone through experiences such as, I am convinced, no white woman has had. I have circumnavigated the South American continent, covering more than 40,000 miles, and have penetrated savage wildernesses where no white woman had ever been. I have climbed mountains, walked in the extinct crater of Mount Misti, wandered in regions of mountain cold where my eyelids froze, and, descending into Amazonian wilderness, stayed in a region infested with vampires–creatures which until then I imagined to be pure myths. I have stood in the site of what is possibly the world’s oldest civilization, and have studied ruins built before the time of Babylon.’

Mrs. Adams has spent about eight years in exploration. In this work and pleasure she discovered, high in the Andes, an unknown river of peat–an important geographical discovery which sheds new light on the geologic formation of the continent. She was the first white woman to invade the interior wilderness of Peru, where she wandered about the sources of the Amazon, in company with jaguars, monstrous snakes, and other wild animals, none of which ever harmed or even attacked her, which led Mrs. Adams to the conclusion that no wild beasts are dangerous unless first attacked themselves by men. On this trip Mrs. Adams came to a region infested by vampires, which previously she had believed to be mythical, and spent a night–the most horrible, she says, of her life–among them. On this occasion her husband and Indian guides were attacked and a number of their mules killed by the blood-sucking creatures which measure three to four feet from tip to tip of their wings.”