Two of the most famous vampire hysteria have plagued villages in what is now Serbia. Then this region was under the rule of the Ottoman Turks, and later, at the end of the 17th century, became part of the Austrian Empire. Austrian military and civilian officials who oversaw the region more than once reported strange incidents in the new lands of the empire.
Many outbreaks of vampire hysteria in the lands of Eastern Europe developed according to a similar scenario.
When, in some peasant community, suddenly someone suddenly died, and behind him, one after another, friends or family members of the deceased / deceased died - with the same sudden and inexplicable death, it seemed to people that supernatural forces were involved.
Local residents believed that the deceased was the first to return back from the grave in order to take his loved ones and friends to the next world.
Such beliefs were very strong in Slavic settlements. Locals organized searches for vampires, during which the bodies of the dead, suspected of coming to life at night and walking around the area, were dug out of their graves and examined, looking for signs of vampirism.
And as often happens, when people are looking for something supernatural, they find what they were looking for! Here are just a few of the strange and inexplicable signs by which the vampire-hunting peasants judged whether the dug-out dead was in fact a vampire or not:
♦ After several weeks, if not more, the bodies did not decompose.
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♦ The deceased appeared to be swollen and bloated and visibly saturated with blood.
♦ Reddish spots appeared on the skin of the deceased.
♦ Instead of old, peeled skin and old fallen off nails, the deceased had new skin and new nails grew.
♦ There was a lot of liquid blood in the corpse; sometimes blood even flowed out of the mouth and nose.
♦ And when the corpse of a vampire was pierced with a stake, he allegedly emitted a heavy groan.
The deceased, recognized as vampires, were “killed” a second time so that they would no longer harm living people. The most reliable method of killing a vampire was considered to be a stake driven into his heart; sometimes a vampire's head was cut off. And it happened - in extreme cases - that the whole corpse was burned. In some cases, outsiders witnessed the massacre of vampires, who then described everything they saw in their reports and reports.
Perhaps the most famous of all "vampire cases" is the case of a Serbian peasant and former soldier named Arnold Paole from the village of Medveđa. Paole died prematurely in 1725, having fallen from a cart with hay and breaking his neck. The peasants buried him in the village churchyard, but they did not forget about him!
The villagers recalled that Paole had complained during his lifetime that he had been attacked by a vampire when he served as a soldier in Turkish-occupied Serbia. To get rid of the annoying inhuman, Paole rubbed himself with the blood of a vampire and ate the earth from his grave. I wonder what kind of goodwill told him about such methods of protection from vampires?
Be that as it may, not even a month had passed since Paole's death, as several residents of Bear confessed that a vampire was hunting them. Around the same time, four more villagers fell ill and died. Suspecting Paola, the peasants dug up his body. Those present at the same time assured that fresh blood flowed from his mouth, nose, ears and eyes.
The peasants drove a stake into Paola's chest. When the stake entered the deceased, a loud groan escaped from him. Then they cut off his head. And then they burned the corpse. The four people who the peasants thought were the victims of Paole were treated the same way.
Several years have passed. Suddenly, in 1732, several more people fell ill and died. The living peasants again suspected that vampires were involved. Rumors spread throughout the village that Paole, perhaps, before the stake was stuck in him, was sucking the blood of sheep, which were then eaten by those peasants who died. And when they died, they themselves turned into vampires. It was these new vampires that began to be suspected of killing other people. Therefore, the peasants decided to dig up their bodies as well.
The Austrian authorities decided to clarify this situation and sent a military outfit with doctors to investigate. Among them was a military doctor named Johannes Flückinger. Flückinger wrote the famous account of this investigation - "Visum et Repertum" ("Report of the Flückinger Commission"), which generated enormous interest in Western Europe. This report, as an official document, gave the vampire problem a touch of credibility.
Before the eyes of Flukkinger and his men, about seventeen coffins were dug and opened. Some bodies were already close to complete decomposition. Others were only partially affected by decay. But there were also those that did not decompose at all, although they were buried, according to the testimony of the peasants, two or three months ago. The undecomposed and incompletely decomposed corpses, the peasants claimed, were vampires. They didn’t want to listen to any of Flukkinger's arguments.
The Austrians carried out a cursory autopsy of the corpses of those deceased people whom fellow villagers suspected of vampirism. In the cavities of all bodies, they found "fresh" - in the words of Flukkinger himself, by which he probably meant not clotted - blood. on some bodies, under the peeling old skin, a young layer of epidermis was clearly visible.
Among the dead peasants, suspected of vampirism, was a soldier's daughter named Stanacka.
Having fallen ill, before her death, she complained that she was attacked and tried to strangle the son of another soldier, whose name was Mile and who had died shortly before. When her body was dug up, a clear trace of a man's finger appeared on the girl's neck.
One of the women, sixty years old, was thin and pale during her lifetime; however, in the grave, she lay plump and rosy, literally "poured" with blood.
She was considered the instigator of a new galaxy of vampires who ate mutton infected Paola. Among the suspects in vampirism were several young children, as well as men and women who died prematurely.
The peasants hired gypsies from a camp that roamed the area to chop off their heads and burn the corpses of those whom they recognized as vampires.
The Flukkinger's Report, signed by medical officials, was read with undisguised interest throughout Western Europe. Several more similar reports about vampire hysteria that happened around the same time also became public knowledge.
So, another Austrian official - this time in the village of Kizilova (Serbia) - recorded the story of a peasant named Peter Plogoevits, whose walking corpse overtook many fears of fellow villagers in 1725
Largely thanks to the "deeds" of Arnold Paole and Peter Plogoevits, the word "vampire" entered the lexicons of Western European languages. In the official report drawn up on the case of Peter Plogojevitz in Germany, approx. 1726, the word “vanpir” (“vanpir”) appeared, which is considered the first use of this term in modern times.
Flukkinger's report has been translated from German into French and English. In the French translation, the term "vampyre" is used for the name of the bloodsucker, and in English - "vampire".
An Austrian official in Serbia did not want to give permission to dig up Peter Plogojevic's corpse, but the peasants insisted on this. After the death of Pogojevitsa, nine people fell ill and died at once. And all of them, as one on their deathbed, claimed that Pogoevits had come to them at night and strangled them. The official, who reluctantly agreed to the opening of his grave, brought an Orthodox priest with him.
The official was greatly surprised to see fresh blood in the mouth of the corpse. He was so shocked that he did not even try to stop the peasants when they sharpened the stake and drove it into the dead body. When the stake pierced the deceased, blood gushed not only from his mouth, but also from his ears.
The official was also struck by another strange fact, which he refused to divulge out of delicacy. Vampire researchers tend to think that the corpse had an erection!