Did vampires really exist?

No: there is no evidence that a dead person can return from the grave and feed on blood. What is documented is the belief in vampires, which in the 18th century led to official exhumations of corpses in the Balkans. The signs interpreted as vampirism, such as blood at the mouth or a swollen body, correspond to the normal stages of decomposition.

Where does the vampire myth come from?

From the folklore of Eastern Europe and the Balkans, where some dead people were believed to return and harm the living. The myth spread across Europe after 1725-1732, when reports by Austrian officials and army doctors on exhumations in Serbia were published and picked up by newspapers.

What are anti-vampire burials?

They are burials with unusual practices meant to stop the dead from returning: a sickle across the neck, a padlock on the foot, a stone or brick in the mouth, the body face down or decapitated. Archaeologists have found them mainly in Poland and Central-Eastern Europe, between the Middle Ages and the early modern period.

Does porphyria explain vampires?

No. The hypothesis, put forward in 1985 by biochemist David Dolphin, has been rejected by specialists: people with porphyria do not crave blood, and sensitivity to sunlight is a modern addition to the vampire myth. The hypothesis also contributed to stigmatising patients.

Why do vampires die in sunlight?

In folklore and in Bram Stoker's Dracula the sun does not kill the vampire: the count can move about by day, albeit with reduced powers. Death by sunlight appears in the 1922 film Nosferatu, so it is a cinematic invention.

Are antique vampire killing kits genuine?

In the vast majority of cases, no. Expert studies, including those by the UK's Royal Armouries, indicate that these kits were assembled in the 20th century, often after 1970, combining antique and modern objects. The supposed silver bullets in one kit that was analysed turned out to be pewter.

Vampires: history, folklore and the science behind the myth

When people talk about vampires, almost everyone thinks of Count Dracula, the black cape, the sharp fangs. In the article on Dracula and Vlad the Impaler I separated the historical figure from the literary character. Here I take a step back, and a step deeper: where does the vampire come from before Dracula?

The answer is surprising. Not from a novel, but from official reports by officials and army doctors of the Habsburg Empire, who between 1725 and 1732 witnessed the exhumation of corpses accused of killing the living. Reports that were signed, dated and published in the newspapers. Perfect material for an investigator: witnesses, written records, physical evidence and, above all, many questions about how it was all interpreted.

A note on method, as always: in this article I distinguish between what the sources document (the belief, the exhumations, the burials) and what they do not (the existence of the returning dead). And I point out where scholars are still divided.

Three different vampires: folklore, literature and film

The first mistake to avoid is talking about "the vampire" as if it were a single figure. There are at least three:

Feature	Folklore vampire	Literary vampire (1819-1897)	Film vampire (from 1922)
Who it is	A recently deceased peasant, often from the village	A seductive, foreign aristocrat	A monster or a seducer, depending on the film
Appearance	Bloated, ruddy, with blood at the mouth	Pale, elegant, magnetic	Pale, fangs, cape
Who it attacks	Relatives and neighbours	Young women and men	Anyone
How it acts	Smothers, presses, "drains life"; causes chains of illness and death	Bites the neck and drinks blood	Bites the neck and drinks blood
Sunlight	No particular effect	Dracula moves about by day, with reduced powers	Kills it (from Nosferatu, 1922)
How to stop it	Exhumation, stake, decapitation, burning	Stake, decapitation, sacred objects	Stake, sunlight, cross, garlic

The folklore vampire is a dead villager suspected of returning to harm their own family and community. It resembles a contagious ghost more than a Transylvanian count.

Before 1725: the roots

Belief in the returning dead is very old and widespread, but beware of shortcuts: not every demon or ghost is a vampire.

Source or tradition	Period	What it describes	Assessment
Lamiae, striges, Lilith	Antiquity	Female demons who attack children or men, sometimes drinking blood	Demonic figures, not returning dead: distant relatives, not direct ancestors
William of Newburgh, Historia rerum Anglicarum	12th century	Tales of English dead who leave the grave, terrorise the living and are exhumed and burned	The medieval revenant: very close to the folklore vampire, but without the name
Leone Allacci, work on the beliefs of the Greeks	1645	Describes the Greek vrykolakas, the dead who return	Scholarly source on a living belief
Joseph Pitton de Tournefort, Relation d'un voyage du Levant	Published 1717, on a journey of 1700-1702	Witnesses on Mykonos the exhumation and burning of a supposed vrykolakas amid collective panic	Sceptical eyewitness: attributes everything to suggestion
Slavic folklore: upir, vampir	Middle Ages and early modern period	Returning dead, often linked to violent deaths, suicides, the excommunicated or funeral rites not properly observed	The direct root of the 18th-century vampire

The word itself has an interesting history: according to the main etymological dictionaries, vampire first appears in English in 1732, right on the wave of the Serbian cases, via German Vampir and the Slavic languages. Its deeper origin is uncertain.

The file: the exhumations in Serbia (1725-1732)

After the Peace of Passarowitz (1718), part of Serbia came under Habsburg control. Austrian officials and army doctors thus came into contact with the beliefs of frontier villages, and had to put them in writing.

Case 1: Petar Blagojević, Kisiljevo, 1725

Item	What the sources report
Place	The village of Kisilova, probably present-day Kisiljevo
The facts	After the death of the peasant Petar Blagojević (Peter Plogojowitz in German sources), nine people die within eight days; some say on their deathbeds that he attacked them in their sleep
The exhumation	The body appears undecomposed, with hair and beard grown, "new" skin and nails, fresh blood at the mouth
The treatment	A stake through the heart, from which blood flows from the mouth and ears; then burning
The witness	Imperial official Ernst Frombald, who attends and states that he gave in to pressure from the villagers, who were "beside themselves with fear"
Spread	The report is published by the Wienerisches Diarium, the Vienna gazette

Case 2: Arnold Paole and Medveđa, 1726-1732

The second case is the one that turned the vampire into a European phenomenon.

Date	Event
About 1726	Arnold Paole, a former irregular soldier (hajduk) settled in Medveđa, dies after falling from a hay wagon. In life he claimed to have been tormented by a vampire
About 40 days later	After several deaths attributed to him, the villagers exhume him: the body appears intact, with fresh blood. It is staked, beheaded and burned, together with his four supposed victims
1731	A new wave of deaths. Army physician Glaser visits the village on 12 December: he finds no sign of contagion, blames the deaths on malnutrition and fasting, but suggests humouring the villagers, who threaten to abandon the village
7 January 1732	A second commission, led by military surgeon Johann Flückinger, exhumes 17 bodies: 5 are decomposed, 12 appear well preserved, with fresh blood, "regrown" nails and rosy skin. The doctors speak of a "vampiric condition"
After the examination	The "vampiric" bodies are beheaded and burned, and the ashes thrown into the West Morava river
26 January 1732	The report, known as Visum et Repertum, is signed in Belgrade by five officers
February 1732 onwards	The report and a letter from Glaser's father are published and reprinted across Europe

The investigator's lesson. The Visum et Repertum is an authentic document signed by professionals. But an authentic record does not guarantee a correct interpretation. The surgeons described precisely what they saw; the problem is that they interpreted as abnormal what was normal, because they did not know enough about the stages of decomposition. It is the same mistake found in many investigations: accurate observation, wrong conclusion.

The European debate

The Serbian reports sparked a debate involving doctors, theologians and philosophers:

Year	Author	Position
1746	Dom Augustin Calmet, Benedictine abbot	In his Dissertations sur les apparitions… et sur les revenans et vampires he collects a huge number of cases; he expresses doubts, but his work helps spread the subject
1755	Gerard van Swieten, court physician to Maria Theresa	Asked to examine cases of alleged vampirism in Habsburg territories, he attributes them to natural causes and superstition. His treatise would be published in German in 1768
1755	Maria Theresa of Austria	An imperial decree makes desecrating graves on the pretext of defending against vampires a punishable offence, and places reports of vampirism under censorship
1763	Jean-Jacques Rousseau	In his Letter to Christophe de Beaumont he provocatively observes that few facts are attested by as many testimonies and documents as vampires: to show that the quantity of testimony is not enough to prove a fact
1772	Voltaire	In an article in the Questions sur l'Encyclopédie, later merged into the Philosophical Dictionary, he ridicules the belief

Rousseau's remark is still a lesson in method today: many concordant testimonies do not prove a fact if they share the same prejudice and the same interpretation.

The scientific explanation: what happens to a body after death

The decisive work on this point is the book by American scholar Paul Barber, Vampires, Burial, and Death: Folklore and Reality (Yale University Press, 1988). Barber compared exhumation accounts with forensic knowledge, showing that almost all the "signs of vampirism" correspond to the normal stages of decomposition.

"Evidence" of vampirism in the sources	Forensic explanation
Body not decomposed weeks after death	The rate of decomposition varies enormously with temperature, humidity, soil and depth. Burial in winter or in cold, clay soil slows it considerably
Swollen, "well-fed" body, rosy or dark skin	Gases produced by bacteria swell the body; the skin changes colour. To villagers it looked like a "sated" corpse
Fresh blood at the mouth and nose	Decomposition fluids, pushed by gas pressure, seep from the mouth and nose. Blood, after initially clotting, can become fluid again
"New" skin and nails	The outer layer of skin slips off, revealing the layer beneath; nails fall off, exposing the nail bed, which looks like a new nail
Hair, beard and nails "grown"	The skin retracts as it dries out, making hair and nails look longer
The corpse "groans" when staked	The stake releases compressed gases, which can produce a sound as they pass through the windpipe
The body has "moved" in the grave	Bloating, collapse of the coffin, animals, water, or earlier interference

And the chains of deaths? The sources speak of villages hit by many deaths in a short time. The most plausible explanations are epidemics (tuberculosis, typhus, cholera, plague), famine and malnutrition, as army physician Glaser had already suggested in 1731. The vampire was, in essence, a theory of contagion before germ theory: the first to die "pulled the others along". It is a mechanism similar to that of the plague spreaders I analysed in the article on the plague described by Manzoni: faced with incomprehensible death, people look for someone to blame.

Medical hypotheses: what holds up and what does not

Hypothesis	Proposed by	Arguments	Assessment
Decomposition and contagion	Paul Barber (1988) and others	Matches in detail what the sources describe	The most solid explanation for the exhumations
Rabies	Juan Gómez-Alonso, neurologist, journal Neurology (1998)	Biting, hypersensitivity to stimuli such as light, smells and mirrors, insomnia and night wandering, aggression; a rabies epizootic in Hungary around 1721-1728	Suggestive for some traits, but does not explain the exhumations; remains a proposal, not a conclusion
Porphyria	David Dolphin, biochemist (1985)	Light sensitivity, supposed need for blood	Rejected: patients do not crave blood, drinking blood would have no therapeutic effect, light sensitivity is not part of the original folklore. It contributed to stigmatising patients
Tuberculosis	Studies of the New England "vampire panic"	A slow disease that "consumes" whole families, one after another	Explains the 19th-century American cases well (see below)
Premature burial	Various	People buried alive by mistake, with signs of movement	Possible in isolated cases, but does not explain the belief as a whole

The American case: Mercy Brown, 1892

The belief did not stay confined to the Balkans. In 19th-century New England, tuberculosis, then called "consumption", was wiping out entire families. The idea spread that a dead relative could "consume" the living from the grave.

In 1892, in Exeter, Rhode Island, 19-year-old Mercy Brown, who had died of tuberculosis after her mother and sister, was exhumed about two months after her death at her neighbours' insistence. The body, buried in midwinter, showed little decomposition and the heart contained liquid blood.
The heart was burned, and the ashes mixed with water and given to her sick brother to drink. He died anyway.
In 1990, in Griswold, Connecticut, a 19th-century burial was discovered with "JB 55" on the coffin: the skeleton had been exhumed and rearranged with the skull and thighbones placed on the chest. DNA analysis later identified the deceased as a farmer named John Barber.

Anthropologist Michael Bell, who has studied these cases in depth, stresses an important detail: the word "vampire" was used by the newspapers, not by the families. For them it was a desperate rite of protection, not the hunt for a monster.

Archaeology: anti-vampire burials

If the belief was widespread, it should have left traces in the ground. And indeed archaeology has documented numerous "atypical" or "deviant" burials, especially in Central and Eastern Europe.

Site	Period	What was found	What the analyses say
Drawsko Pomorskie, Poland	17th-18th century	Six burials with sickles across the neck or abdomen, or stones under the chin, out of 333 graves	The study by Gregoricka, Betsinger and colleagues (PLOS ONE, 2014), using strontium isotope analysis, showed they were local people, not outsiders; the authors suggest a link with a cholera epidemic
Pień, Poland	Mid-17th century	A young woman aged about 17-19 with a sickle across her neck and a padlock on her foot; the cemetery has at least a dozen atypical burials out of 101	Excavations by Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń, led by Dariusz Poliński (from 2022). The sickle was probably added when the grave was reopened; 2026 analyses point to a copper object in the mouth, not yet identified
Lazzaretto Nuovo, Venice	16th century, according to the researchers	The skull of a woman with a brick in her mouth, in a mass burial from a plague epidemic	Interpretation proposed by Matteo Borrini (University of Florence): a rite against the dead believed to "chew" their shroud and spread contagion. Suggestive, but based on a single case

What we can conclude, and what we cannot

We can conclude that in several communities there was a fear that some of the dead might return, and that practices were adopted to prevent it.
We cannot conclude that every atypical burial is "anti-vampire". A stone in the mouth, a body face down or a decapitation can have other explanations: punishment, rites for suicides or the excommunicated, hasty burials during an epidemic, or even later interference.
"Vampire found" headlines are journalism, not archaeology. Archaeologists more correctly speak of atypical or deviant burials.

From the grave to the page: how the literary vampire was born

Year	Work	What it adds to the myth
1819	John Polidori, The Vampyre	Born from the evenings at Villa Diodati, on Lake Geneva, in the summer of 1816, with Lord Byron and the Shelleys. The vampire becomes a seductive aristocrat, Lord Ruthven, modelled on Byron himself
1845-1847	Varney the Vampire	A popular serial, among the first to describe fangs leaving two holes in the neck
1871-1872	Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, Carmilla	The female vampire, seduction, the Central European setting
1897	Bram Stoker, Dracula	Blends folklore, Transylvania and the name of Vlad III; fixes the modern rules of the genre
1922	F. W. Murnau, Nosferatu	The vampire dies in sunlight: an invention of cinema
1931	Tod Browning, Dracula, with Bela Lugosi	The cape, the accent, the elegance: the image we still know today

There is a curious Swiss connection: the modern literary vampire was born on the shores of Lake Geneva, in the same summer of 1816 that also gave rise to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. A cold, rainy summer, caused by the effects of the 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora, which kept the group indoors telling each other ghost stories.

And bats?

The link between vampires and bats came after the myth, not before it. French naturalist Buffon applied the name "vampire" to a South American bat in 1774. The bats that really feed on blood are three species, all native to the Americas: in Europe, where the myth was born, they never existed.

Vampires in court: when myth meets criminology

The press has applied the "vampire" label to some real criminals. There is nothing supernatural here, only serious crimes reported under a sensational label.

Name	Place and period	Why he was called a "vampire"	Note
Vincenzo Verzeni	Bergamo area, 1870s	A strangler convicted of two murders and several attempted murders; he confessed to taking pleasure in his victims' blood too	Studied by Cesare Lombroso; the press called him "the vampire of Bergamo"
Peter Kürten	Düsseldorf, 1929-1930	A series of murders and assaults, with statements about pleasure linked to blood	Executed in 1931; known as "the Vampire of Düsseldorf"
John George Haigh	England, 1940s	Claimed to have drunk his victims' blood	Many scholars believe it was an attempt to be declared insane; he was executed in 1949

In psychiatry, "clinical vampirism" or "Renfield syndrome", a term proposed by psychologist Richard Noll in 1992, is sometimes mentioned. It is not a diagnosis recognised by the official manuals: it describes rare behaviours that usually fall under other disorders.

As in other cases I have analysed, starting with Landru, the Bluebeard of Gambais, the press nickname says a lot about the public and little about the criminal.

The collector's view: "vampire killing kits"

Elegant wooden boxes with stakes, crucifixes, vials of "holy water", pistols and silver bullets regularly appear at auction, presented as 19th-century vampire killing kits. As a collector, I see them as an excellent case study in forgery.

Item	What experts have established
Dating	The UK Royal Armouries kit, examined by curator Jonathan Ferguson, has a box from about 1920, but was probably assembled around or after 1970
Silver bullets	They were not associated with vampires before the 20th century: their presence is already a sign of forgery. In a kit at the Mercer Museum, X-ray fluorescence showed the bullets were pewter, with no silver
"Professor Ernst Blomberg"	Many kits bear the name of a mysterious professor and a gunsmith, "Nicolas Plomdeur". According to research by the specialist site Vamped, one maker admitted inventing both characters; he had been assembling kits since 1979
Antique objects	Some components, such as a 19th-century pistol or a crucifix, may really be old. But a set of antique objects does not make the set antique

The investigator's lesson. It is the same principle as with forged documents: a good forgery mixes authentic elements with invention. To assess it, you have to date the assembly, not just the individual pieces, and check the documented provenance. Without a chain of provenance, an "antique kit" is just an attractive decorative object.

In short

Question	Answer based on the sources
Did vampires exist?	No. The belief is documented, not the existence of the returning dead
Where does the modern myth come from?	From the official Austrian reports on the 1725-1732 exhumations in Serbia, spread by the European press
What did the 1732 doctors see?	The normal stages of decomposition, interpreted as anomalies
What did the vampire explain?	The chains of deaths during epidemics: a "theory of contagion" before germs
Are there archaeological traces?	Yes, atypical burials in Poland and elsewhere; but not all are "anti-vampire"
Porphyria or rabies?	Porphyria is rejected; rabies is a partial hypothesis; decomposition and epidemics remain the main explanation
The elegant vampire and sunlight?	Inventions of literature (1819-1897) and cinema (1922)
Antique vampire killing kits?	Almost always assembled in the 20th century

The vampire never rose from a grave. But it did rise from official records, newspapers and the fears of communities who watched their loved ones die without understanding why. Studying it with method means doing what the surgeons at Medveđa could not: separating observation from interpretation. That is, after all, the heart of every investigation.

Main sources: report by E. Frombald (1725) and Visum et Repertum by J. Flückinger (Belgrade, 26 January 1732), as reconstructed in historical studies; J. Pitton de Tournefort, Relation d'un voyage du Levant (1717); A. Calmet, Dissertations sur les apparitions (1746); G. van Swieten, Abhandlung des Daseyns der Gespenster, nebst einem Anhange vom Vampyrismus (1768); J.-J. Rousseau, Lettre à Christophe de Beaumont (1763); P. Barber, Vampires, Burial, and Death: Folklore and Reality (Yale University Press, 1988); J. Gómez-Alonso, Neurology (1998); M. G. Winkler and K. E. Anderson, Perspectives in Biology and Medicine (1990), on porphyria; M. E. Bell, Anthropology and Humanism (2006), on New England; L. A. Gregoricka, T. K. Betsinger and colleagues, PLOS ONE (2014), on Drawsko; statements by Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń on the Pień site (2022-2026); M. Borrini, on the Lazzaretto Nuovo in Venice; Online Etymology Dictionary, entry "vampire"; Royal Armouries and Vamped research on vampire killing kits.

Vampires: history, folklore and science. What lies behind the myth