The vampire of the modern imagination is an aristocrat in a cape: pale, elegant, seductive, living in a castle, sleeping in a coffin, and drinking the blood of the living through two neat puncture wounds. This figure owes almost everything to nineteenth-century fiction, above all Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). The vampire of folklore was something quite different: a bloated, ruddy-faced peasant corpse that rose from its grave to trouble its family and neighbours, bringing sickness and death to the village — until the villagers dug it up, drove a stake through it, and burned it.
The folklore vampire was taken with deadly seriousness in parts of Eastern Europe, and in the early eighteenth century official reports of vampire exhumations caused a sensation across the continent.
The Word
The word vampire entered Western European languages in the 1720s and 1730s, through German reports from Serbia. It comes from Serbian vampir, a word related to terms across the Slavic languages (Bulgarian vapir, Polish upiór, Russian upyr’). Its ultimate origin is uncertain. The Romanian equivalent is strigoi, related to the Latin strix, a screech-owl and night-demon.
The Folklore Vampire
In the traditional beliefs of the Balkans and Eastern Europe, a vampire was a dead person who did not rest. People might become vampires if they:
- died by suicide or violence,
- were excommunicated or died unbaptized,
- led wicked lives or practised witchcraft,
- were born with a caul, teeth, or a tail,
- had an animal, especially a cat, jump over their corpse before burial,
- or were not given proper funeral rites.
The vampire returned at night. It might sit on the chests of sleepers and smother them, drain their vitality or blood, attack livestock, or simply appear to relatives, who would then sicken and die. A series of deaths in a family or village, especially during an epidemic, was a sign that a vampire was at work.
Signs in the Grave
When a vampire was suspected, villagers would open the grave. The signs they looked for were:
- a body that had not decomposed,
- ruddy or plump skin,
- fresh blood at the mouth or nose,
- grown hair and fingernails,
- a body that had shifted in its grave or had its shroud chewed.
Modern forensic science explains these as normal stages of decomposition. Bloating from gas makes a body look plump and well-fed; the skin darkens; fluid from the lungs, often bloody, is forced out of the mouth and nose; the skin shrinks back from the nails and hair, making them look longer. When a stake is driven into a bloated corpse, gas escapes with a groan — which villagers took for the vampire’s last cry. The historian Paul Barber, in Vampires, Burial, and Death (1988), showed how closely the folklore matches the reality of decay.
Destroying the Vampire
Methods of dealing with a vampire included:
- driving a stake — often of hawthorn, ash, or aspen — through the heart,
- decapitating the body and placing the head between the legs,
- burning the body, sometimes mixing the ashes with water for the sick to drink,
- placing garlic, thorns, or a sickle in the grave,
- burying the body face down, so it would dig in the wrong direction.
Archaeologists have found such “deviant burials” across Europe. In 2022, excavators at Pień in Poland found the skeleton of a seventeenth-century woman with a sickle across her neck and a padlock on her toe, apparently to prevent her from rising. In Venice, a sixteenth-century plague burial was found with a brick forced into the skull’s mouth, perhaps to stop a “shroud-eater.”
Arnold Paole and the 1720s Panic
In the 1720s, Austria had recently taken over northern Serbia from the Ottoman Empire, and Austrian officials began to record local customs. Two cases became famous.
In 1725, in the village of Kisiljevo, a peasant named Petar Blagojević died, and within eight days nine more villagers died, several claiming that Petar had come to them at night and throttled them. The villagers dug him up, found him apparently fresh with blood in his mouth, staked and burned him. The imperial official Frombald witnessed it and reported it to Vienna.
In 1726–27, at Medveđa, a former soldier named Arnold Paole (Arnaut Pavle) died after falling from a hay wagon. He had claimed that he was once troubled by a vampire in Kosovo, and had protected himself by eating earth from its grave. After his death, several people said he had visited them, and four died. He was exhumed, found “undecayed,” and staked, whereupon he gave a groan. In 1731–32, a new wave of deaths at Medveđa was attributed to people who had eaten the meat of cattle he had preyed on. An Austrian army surgeon, Johann Flückinger, led a team to exhume and examine the bodies, and his report, Visum et Repertum (1732), was widely published.
The reports caused a sensation. Newspapers in Germany, France, England, and Holland carried them, and scholars debated whether vampires could be real. The French Benedictine Dom Augustin Calmet wrote a long treatise on the subject in 1746. Voltaire mocked the whole affair. In 1755, the Empress Maria Theresa sent her physician Gerard van Swieten to investigate a case in Silesia; he concluded that the vampire belief was superstition, and she issued laws forbidding the exhumation of bodies.
The Literary Vampire
The vampire entered literature in the eighteenth century, first in German poetry, and then in English fiction:
- John Polidori’s The Vampyre (1819), written during the same summer at Lake Geneva that produced Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, created the aristocratic vampire, Lord Ruthven, modelled on Lord Byron.
- Varney the Vampire (1845–47), a popular “penny dreadful” serial, introduced fangs and puncture wounds.
- Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1872) told of a female vampire who preys on a young woman.
- Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) drew all these elements together, and borrowed the name of the fifteenth-century Wallachian prince Vlad III Dracula, “the Impaler,” though Stoker knew little about the historical Vlad.
The New England Vampire Panic
Vampire beliefs also appeared in nineteenth-century New England, where families devastated by tuberculosis (“consumption”) sometimes exhumed the first family member to die, believing the corpse was draining the living. In 1892, in Exeter, Rhode Island, the body of Mercy Brown was exhumed; her heart was burned and the ashes given to her dying brother to drink. He died anyway.
Vampires Around the World
Blood-drinking spirits appear in many cultures: the Greek lamia and empusa; the Jewish Lilith; the Malaysian penanggalan, a woman’s head that detaches and flies with its entrails trailing; the Philippine aswang; the Chinese jiangshi, a hopping corpse; and the West African obayifo. These figures share the fear of the dead, of disease, and of the night.
The Vampire Today
From Bela Lugosi’s Dracula (1931) to Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Twilight, the vampire has become one of the most popular monsters of modern culture — often romantic, sometimes tragic, and always a reflection of the fears and desires of its age.
Last reviewed: September 2026.