In 1846, in Griswold, Connecticut, a certain Horace Ray died of tuberculosis. Over the next six years, two of his adult sons also died - and from the same disease.
And when, two years later, the third son fell ill, relatives and friends of the Rey family could find only one logical explanation: the dead feed on the life of the living and, thereby, kill them. In order to protect the remaining son, relatives dug up and burned the bodies of the alleged vampires.
This case is far from unique. In 1874, for example, a desperate Rhode Island resident named William Rose dug up his own daughter's grave and burned her heart.
This practice of digging and burning, as well as other attempts to pacify the deceased, who did not allow them to live in peace, were widespread in many Western countries until the very beginning of the 20th century. People were sure that only in this way they could prevent the dead from sucking life from the living.
Today, vampires appear to us as blood-sucking sophisticated aristocrats in cloaks - or, at worst, sexy teenagers with skin sparkling in the sun. However, for many centuries, in most countries, from the ancient Greeks and inhabitants of Eastern Europe to the Americans of the 19th century, vampires were considered victims of deadly diseases (or, sometimes, as dead but not calm villains) that suck life from their victims with of the other world.
In order not to let this evil spirits into their villages, the surviving relatives tried to physically keep the dead in their graves, so to speak, to create an obstacle in the path of the deceased.
Last year, Bulgarian archaeologists found two skeletons with metal rods protruding from their ribcage - these people were clearly suspected of committing atrocities after death. Only in Bulgaria alone there are about a hundred such graves.
This summer, researchers discovered graves in Poland in which the heads were severed and placed in the knee area. Probably, the burials hoped in this way to delay the uprising from the graves of potential vampires - before going hunting, they would first have to find their heads.
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In one Italian village, the alleged vampire was buried with a brick in her mouth.
The persistence of the vampire myth is explained by the lack of understanding of people what happens to a person after death. The pagan Slavs clearly did not know anything about the decomposition of the flesh, however, even after centuries, people were embarrassed by the fact that rigor mortis is replaced by the flexibility of the limbs, which makes the corpse look more like a living person. Also, the liquid arising from the decomposing digestive tract, the villagers could take for fresh blood.
Eventually, similar fears migrated to the New World. In the 19th century, a tuberculosis epidemic broke out in New England. People began to notice that the relatives of those who died from this disease began to weaken, grow wither and, in the end, went to the cemetery after their loved ones. This was before the theory of bacteria emerged, so people couldn't come up with any rational explanation. In one town in Connecticut, for example, they tried to defeat the disease by exhuming the remains of deceased relatives and folding their bones crosswise.
Scottish writer Emily Gerard was the first to compile Eastern European myths that gave rise to the practice of "vampire burials." This is what she wrote in an 1885 article published under the title "Transylvanian Prejudice":
“The restless spirits known as 'Strigoi' are not evil at all. However, their appearance does not bode well and can be a harbinger of a serious illness or great misfortune. Another thing is "vampires" or "nosferatu", who were definitely considered servants of evil. Every Romanian peasant believed in their existence as firmly as in the existence of heaven and hell."
And a little later, Bram Stoker's book "Dracula" (which, by the way, was partly based on materials collected by Emilie Gerard), published in 1897, and then its 1931 film adaptation, consolidated in the minds of millions of the image of a vamir approximately the same as he appears to us today.