Vampires Read Online Free Page B

peasant from a village in a part of Serbia that was under Austrian rule at the time. When Plogojowitz died in 1725, nine other deaths occurred in the area immediately afterwards, within a time span of eight days. All the victims claimed that Plogojowitz had come to their death beds at night and tried to strangle them. There were also rumours that Plogojowitz had visited members of his family, asking them for food and shoes, and that when his son had refused, Plogojowitz had killed him. The villagers demanded that the authorities, in the shape of a man named Frombold, and the local priest, should exhume Plogojowitz’s body in case he had turned into a vampire after burial.
    When the body was brought out, it seemed to have grown new skin and nails, as well as more hair and a beard. There was ‘fresh’ blood coming out of its mouth. When the corpse was staked, more apparently fresh blood came out of the ears and mouth. The villagers were extremely frightened, and began to panic, fearing that the vampire could not be killed. Frombold and the priest duly satisfied them that Plogojowitz was indeed dead, and afterwards Frombold filed his report. This became one of the first documented cases about vampires in Eastern Europe, and was widely reported in Germany, England, and France, contributing to the general eighteenth-century panic about vampires.

     
A good-looking corpse
     
    There were numerous other outbreaks of vampire panic in Serbia in the years that followed. In 1731, an official named Dr Glaser investigated a series of deaths that had been blamed on vampirism. After threats from the villagers, he disinterred several of the dead bodies and found that most of them were not decomposed. Instead, they looked plump and had what looked like fresh blood coming out of their mouths. Glaser reported the details of the case to his superiors and recommended that officials should be sent to ‘kill’ the vampires, so as to satisfy the villagers’ superstitions. A military surgeon, Johann Fluckinger, along with others, duly arrived to inspect the bodies further. They found that most of them were ‘quite complete and undecayed’, that they had new nails growing where the old ones had fallen off, and that their skin was ‘red and vivid’. In the case of one deceased woman, the body looked better than it had in life: apparently, she had been rather ‘dried up’ in appearance before her sojourn in the grave, but now she looked the picture of health.
    The surgeons duly diagnosed the exhumed corpses to be in ‘the vampiric condition’, as they put it, and allowed the village elders and some local gypsies to dispose of them as they thought fit. The gypsies cut the heads off the bodies, burned them, and threw the ashes in the river. Once again, when this official report was published, the story aroused tremendous interest, further fuelling the panic about vampires that was beginning to sweep across Europe from the Balkan states.

Vampires & Disease

     
    In the same way that superstitious, uneducated people in the medieval period misunderstood the way corpses naturally decompose after death and burial, there was widespread ignorance about communicable diseases. When a number of deaths among people closely connected in a single town or village occurred, peasant communities often imagined the deaths to be caused by the visitation of a local vampire, rather than attributing the deaths to outbreaks of disease. The vampire in question was often thought to be a neighbour who had died, been buried in a local churchyard, and who was seeking revenge for his or her sudden death by coming back to life as a vampire. The theory was that the vampire would emerge from the grave at night and come back to the village to prey on former family members and friends, trying to suck their blood and in this way achieve immortality. It is possible that this way of thinking arose from primitive feelings of guilt about the fact that, for no apparent reason,