William the Bloody

William Pratt was born circa 1853 in London to Anne Pratt and as yet unnamed husband. William's surname was not revealed in the series and for years was widely accepted to be "Walthrop" in the fandom, which made it fanon. However, creator Joss Whedon recently revealed it to be "Pratt". William Pratt was the birth name of legendary horror actor Boris Karloff.

Since the actor who plays him is 5' 11" (1.80 m), its safe to say the character shares the same height.

In 1880, at approximately 25 to 30 years of age, William was a brown-haired, ineffectual gentleman who lived with his mother and wrote poetry. He was called "William the Bloody" behind his back by his peers, because his poetry was so "bloody awful." This nickname (with more deadly connotations) would follow him in the future as a vampire. After his romantic overtures were rejected by the aristocratic Cecily, a despondent William accepted comfort in the arms of Drusilla only to be bitten and transformed into a vampire. Euphoric with his new-found vampiric abilities, and hungry for revenge on his peers, he abandoned the genteel hypocrisy of Victorian life (though not before turning his own mother into a vampire and staking her shortly thereafter when she taunted him that for years she'd hidden her contempt for him) and became a rebel, adopting a working class accent and becoming prone to impulsiveness and violence. He adopted the name "Spike" because of a habit of torturing people with railroad spikes. (It should be noted that one of his detractors in his human days exclaimed he'd rather "have a railroad spike driven through my head" than listen to William's poetry, a possible inspiration for the torture.)

In the company of Drusilla, her sire Angelus and Angelus's sire Darla, Spike terrorized Britain, Europe, and Asia for almost two decades. Utterly devoted to Drusilla, Spike had a slightly strained relationship with Angelus, rather like two rival brothers; although Angelus enjoyed the company of another male vampire in their travels, he found Spike's eagerness for battle and unnecessary risk to be unbecoming, since Angelus regarded killing as an art, not a sport. The level to which Spike felt any closeness to Darla was never really clarified, although in the flashback in The Girl in Question, both Angelus and Spike express outrage that Darla and Drusilla allowed the Immortal to ravish them concurrently, noting "You never let us do that!" The clear implication that there ARE some things that the two vampire women "let" their paramours do with both of them suggests that Darla's affections might not have been reserved solely for Angelus.

Spike kills his first SlayerIn 1900, in one of his proudest moments, Spike killed a Slayer during the Chinese Boxer Rebellion; it was her sword that gave him the scar on his left eyebrow, which remains a century later. Shortly afterward, Spike and Drusilla lost touch with Darla and Angelus (who, unknown to Spike or Drusilla, had recently been cursed with a soul), and the couple wandered the world seeking amusement and mayhem, occasionally separating to pursue separate interests but always reuniting. During World War II, Spike was captured by Nazis and transported aboard a submarine which was in turn seized by Americans; after he and two other vampires killed most of the crew, Angel made Spike and another vampire Angel had just sired, leave the sub, by forcing them to swim to shore before the submarine reached the United States. By the 1950's, Spike, having reunited with Drusilla, spent some time in Italy.

At some point in a century or so of being his own boss, Spike employed a pair of Fyarl Demons as muscle, which is noteworthy since in the Buffyverse vampires and demons rarely get along. He attended Woodstock, where he drank blood from a hippie and spent the next several hours watching his own hand move. Spike has been known to drive in broad daylight despite the fact that his vulnerability to the sun requires him to cover most of the windows, leaving him with little means to see where he's going.