vampires burial and death folklore and reality

Barber says that when they unearthed Paole's corpse, ``they found that he was quite complete and undecayed that fresh blood had flowed from his eyes, nose, mouth and ears that the shirt, the covering, and the coffin were completely bloody that the old nails on his hands and feet, along with the skin, had fallen off, and that new ones had grown and since they saw from this that he was a true vampire, they drove a stake through his heart, according to their custom, whereby he gave an audible groan and bled copiously.'' The report probably is accurate, says Barber.

One of the vampires, they said, was a man named Arnold Paole. The villagers blamed a number of recent deaths on vampires. One investigation centered on a ``vampire'' in the Serbian village of Medvegia in the early 1730s. ``When we read these reports carefully and compare their findings with what is now known about forensic pathology, we can see why people believed that corpses came to life and returned to wreak havoc on the local population,'' he writes. Although modern scholars reject such reports, Barber says they should not. If it exhibited any abnormalities, it was presumed to be a vampire and ``killed.'' Barber says that a number of eyewitness accounts of these events speak of people buried more than a month whose bodies showed no signs of decay, old corpses full of fresh blood, and corpses who moaned when a stake was driven into them. When a person who died was a suspected vampire, the community often unearthed the corpse for examination.

According to Paul Barber, author of ``Vampires, Burial, and Death: Folklore and Reality,'' Europeans of the early 1700s commonly believed that those who were different or unpopular, suicides or alcoholics, or born deformed, might return from death to prey on the living. But the peasants feared their neighbors, who could become the undead. Your vampires will resemble the elegant Count Dracula of fiction. When the vampires knock at your door Halloween night, they won't look anything like the historical vampires who terrorized European peasants.

Vampires burial and death folklore and reality