Vampires

When 17 people died mysteriously in a Serbian village during the winter of 1731–32, surgeon Johannes Flückinger was curious. What could be causing these deaths? He dug up the bodies and found something shocking. Fresh blood was coming from their mouths and noses. He decided they were vampires.

Pandemic panic

News spread quickly. In 1732, a London newspaper published reports of panic among villagers in some parts of Europe – and, for the first time, readers saw the word “vampyre” printed in English.

Sink your teeth into this

Vampire stories are centuries old but books and films from the Victorian era created the vampire we know today: an undead person who lives in a coffin and drinks blood. Not all vampires are the same though. Sometimes they drink blood, other times they feed on someone’s energy or change into animals such as bats.

Speaking with Science+Nature’s Mysteries of Science podcast, Alex Foulkes, author of Rules for Vampires, says that vampires can be found in almost every culture. “There are vampires from all over, from the continent of Africa, from Asia and the Far East. They have a very deep, rich history.”

A Victorian series called Varney the Vampire gave them fangs. Dracula came out in 1897 and then films took over. Nosferatu showed vampires dying in sunlight. If you dress up as a vampire this Halloween, you’re actually wearing a costume from a film almost 100 years old!

But people don’t just tell stories about vampires. They also try to stop them. Archaeologists (people who dig up things humans left behind) have found bodies with heavy stones on them, sickles (a type of sharp blade), and even padlocks. If the dead tried to get back out, these things would trap them in the grave.

Vampire hunting

What about the evidence Flückinger saw? When he dug up those bodies in 1732, what he saw was normal. Lots of things happen to a dead body. It can swell with gas and soft tissue like gums can start to rot, making human teeth look more like fangs. Pressure inside the body can also make it look like it’s coughing up blood. The villagers were not stupid or lying, they were just describing what they saw and didn’t have any explanation at the time.

Neurologist Juan Gómez-Alonso does have an explanation. He thinks the deaths were because of rabies. Rabies is a disease carried by dogs, bats and foxes. It interrupts sleep, makes people angry, makes them see things that are not there, and even makes people bite. These are all traits of vampires. At the same time as Flückinger’s discovery, there was an outbreak of rabies making its way across Europe, infecting people.

Coffin closed

Concerned about the stories, an Austrian Empress sent her own doctor to the village who reported back that everything was normal. In other words, there were no vampires. In 1755, she made it a crime to open a grave and hunt a vampire.

That didn’t make the stories disappear. Vampires kept changing and moved from stories to screens. The more we learn about disease and how bodies react after death, the more we find explanations for things that seem supernatural.

People often make up stories to explain what we can’t understand. The villagers of 1732 were just trying to make sense of something scary with the knowledge they had.

Real life vampire?

Highgate Cemetery in London is one of the country’s largest burial grounds. On Friday 13th March 1970, hundreds of people turned up to hunt for a vampire. Journalists had reported that two people had seen a vampire and individuals were desperate to catch it. Over 40 police officers tried to keep the crowd out but failed.

Some of the vampire hunters damaged the cemetery. People later dug up bodies to burn or behead them. The two people who claimed to have seen the vampire were jailed but the panic continued for years. Even in modern times, people love to believe a good story.

Also

Vampire bat spit contains a blood thinner that scientists named draculin after Dracula.

First published in The Week Junior Science+Nature, issue 106, November 2026.