Before Spooky Passport, there was Buffy.
“No, Mom. She’s a vampire SLAYER.“
This was my exasperated response to my mother attempting to paint my face white one Halloween in the 90’s.
She thought Buffy the Vampire Slayer was also a vampire.
But this distinction was quite important to me.
The outfit had to be right: from Buffy’s tank top to her leather pants.
Then the most important part: the stake.
Because I wasn’t dressing up to be the monster.
I was dressing up to fight the monster.
That tiny memory makes me laugh now, but when I think about it, I realize it says something about what Buffy represented to me from the very beginning.
The darkness wasn’t the point. What you did with it was.
(This is probably why I hate Faith so much. JUSTICE FOR KENDRA. Lol.)
Buffy Taught Me to Be Curious About the Dark
I think that’s the part I understand better now.
Buffy didn’t simply make me love vampires.
She taught me that the strange and frightening parts of the world could also be fascinating.
The unknown didn’t have to be something you ran away from.
You could investigate it.
Ask where the story came from.
You could walk toward it with curiosity.
I don’t think I consciously thought, One day this will become my travel philosophy.
I was a kid watching television.
But somewhere along the way, those stories became part of how I learned to see the world.
And when I look at the way I travel now, the connection feels obvious.
I’m rarely interested in a place simply because it’s beautiful.
I want to know why something exists.
Where did this legend come from?
Why do people believe this?
What happened here?
How did this tradition develop?
What strange little connection can I find that I didn’t expect?
That curiosity is what eventually became part of my travel lens.
Vampires Were Never Just Vampires
Of course, Buffy also introduced me to a whole world of mythology.
Vampires. Demons. Witches. Werewolves. Prophecies. Ancient curses. Secret societies. Mysticism. Hell dimensions. Monsters hiding underneath ordinary life.
But the show didn’t just use those things as decoration.
The supernatural world had rules, histories and consequences.
Angel was one of the earliest examples that really stuck with me.
Before he was Angel, he was Angelus, a vampire who had spent more than a century committing horrific acts. After he murdered a beloved daughter of the Kalderash in Romania, the Romani clan cursed him by restoring his human soul, forcing him to live with the weight of everything he had done.
And then came the cruelest part of the curse.
Angel could never experience true happiness.
Because if he did, he would lose his soul.
Which, of course, became especially complicated when he fell in love with Buffy.
When they finally got together, it felt like thee television event.
Buffy and Angel. The Slayer and the vampire. The impossible romance we’d been watching build toward.
And then happiness became dangerous.
Angel’s moment of true happiness caused him to lose his soul and revert to Angelus, turning the love story into something terrifying.
I was young when I watched this.
But I understood the emotional stakes.
The monster wasn’t simply a monster.
The hero wasn’t simply a hero.
Love wasn’t automatically safe.
And sometimes the thing you wanted most could also be the thing that destroyed everything.
That kind of storytelling stayed with me.
Buffy Was Powerful Without Being Perfect
For as long as I can remember, Buffy was one of those characters who felt bigger than the television screen.
She was powerful.
Not perfect. Not invincible. Not always certain that she was doing the right thing.
Powerful anyway.
Buffy could be righteous and still question herself. She could make mistakes, fall in love with the wrong person, get angry, be selfish, be afraid, and sometimes make decisions that weren’t entirely black or white.
And somehow, she was still the hero.
Looking back now, I realize how unusual that felt for a young girl watching television at the time. There were certainly other strong female characters, but Buffy wasn’t simply presented as “the strong girl.” She was allowed to be complicated.
She could be feminine and fierce.
She could care deeply about her friends and still be the person walking into the cemetery with a stake in her hand.
She was allowed to be human while doing extraordinary things.
Buffy Wasn’t the Only One
I loved Xena: Warrior Princess, too.
There was something about watching women fight their own battles while simultaneously navigating friendship, love, morality, responsibility and all the messy parts of being a person that completely captivated me.
And I think that’s an important distinction because I’ve never really been drawn to adventure simply for the sake of proving that I can endure something.
I don’t need to backpack across a continent just to say I survived it.
I’ve learned this very clearly through travel.
My version of adventure is curiosity.
It’s finding a strange little cultural connection that nobody else seems to have noticed.
It’s sitting in a jazz club in Mongolia and realizing I’m listening to a Kazakh singer performing jazz halfway around the world.
It’s going to Transylvania because I want to understand the folklore instead of just dressing up like a vampire.
It’s finding the weird, beautiful, spooky, unexpected thing hiding somewhere ordinary.
That’s my adventure.
Before Spooky Passport
Today, Spooky Passport is the travel lens I use to explore mystery, strange histories, supernatural stories, and unusual experiences around the world and closer to home.
But the lens existed long before I gave it a name.
Buffy was one of the earliest pieces of it.
Before I had a passport, I was already fascinated by vampires, mythology, monsters and stories that existed somewhere between history and imagination.
And years later, I started traveling to the places where some of those stories originated.
Places with legends that existed long before I arrived.
The difference is that now, I don’t just want to watch the story.
I want to go there.
I want to understand it.
I want to see what survives outside the screen.
And Apparently, Buffy Also Started My Type
There is one other contribution Buffy made to my personal development that I feel obligated to acknowledge.
Spike.
Specifically, Spike’s white hair.
Because apparently this was the beginning of a pattern.
Sisqó.
Spike.
Gojo.
Howl.
Dark Schneider from Bastard!!.
At some point I had to admit that perhaps I have a type.
Give me a man with silver or white hair and apparently my brain goes, Yes. Him.
So even my questionable taste in fictional men may have an origin story.
Thank you, Buffy.
Please don’t think I’m forgetting about Angel. I might have been young, but I knew that man was FIONE. Even when I re-watch it now, I just shake my head in disbelief that a man like him could exist.
The Stories We Grow Up With
To this day, I still get excited when I stumble across Buffy merchandise. I found Buffy the Vampire Slayer nail polish at Dollar Tree recently and immediately thought, I don’t even want to use this. I want to keep it for the packaging.
That’s the funny thing about the stories we grow up with.
We don’t always realize what they’re teaching us while we’re watching them.
At the time, Buffy was simply a show I loved.
A character I admired.
A world I couldn’t get enough of.
But looking back, I can see how much of that world followed me.
The fascination with the strange.
The comfort with the dark.
The attraction to folklore.
The instinct to ask where a story came from.
The desire to walk toward the unknown instead of away from it.
And maybe that’s why, years later, I became the person who travels halfway around the world looking for those same things.
I didn’t leave Buffy behind.
I just got a passport.
And apparently, somewhere along the way, that little girl who insisted she was a vampire slayer became a woman who still wants to know what is waiting on the other side of the darkness.
