Vampires Through the Ages by Brian Righi Read Free Book Online Page B

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” (Barber 1988, 160).
    Convinced that these strange signs marked Paole as the vampire plaguing their village, the men drove a stake through his heart, immediately causing the corpse to let out a terrible groan and sending a massive amount of blood flying from the wound. The body was then dragged from its coffin, the head cut off, and the remains burned, before being returned to the grave. In like manner the bodies of the victims were also exhumed and treated to prevent the vampirism from spreading.
    After this, things seemed to quiet down for a time until the winter of 1731, when as many as ten villagers died in the space of a few weeks from an unknown illness that caused pain in the sides and chest, prolonged fever, jerking limbs, and finally death. Panic consumed the village once more, and there was talk that vampires were yet again at Medvegia’s doorstep. The village elders in turn appealed to Oberstleutnant Schnezzer, the Austrian military commander of the region, for help. He, however, feared an outbreak of disease rather than of vampires and sent an infectious-disease specialist, one Doctor Glaser, to investigate the reports. Glaser, after examining the villagers and their homes, was nevertheless at a loss to explain the cause of the inexplicable deaths. By now the situation had reached such a pitch that terrified villagers were banding together at night in groups for protection. Glaser’s only recourse was to suggest to his superiors that they allow the village to exhume and “kill” the supposed vampires in order to appease the growing delirium.
    Taking the good doctor’s advice, the Supreme Commander of Belgrade, Botta d’Adorno, elected to send a commission of military officers and surgeons under the direction of Doctor Johann Flückinger to investigate the matter. On January 7th, under the watchful eye of the commission, the elders of Medvegia hired a group of passing Gypsies to open the graves of suspected vampires in the village cemetery and search them for signs of the curse. In all, thirteen of the seventeen corpses exhumed appeared undecayed, with fresh blood around the mouth and what looked to be new skin and nails growing under the old. One corpse, belonging to a sixty-year-old woman who was known for her thinness in life, was found bloated and full of blood. Some of those bearing the marks of the vampire belonged to the same men who helped destroy the corpse of Arnod Paole, and in doing so had smeared their bodies with his blood for protection.
    After the surgeons performed their medical examinations of the corpses and agreed that the bodies bore the traditional signs of the vampire, the hired Gypsies cut off the heads, burned the remains, and scattered the ashes into a river. Doctor Flückinger submitted the details of the incident in a report entitled Visum et Repertum , or “Seen and Discovered,” which he sent to the Imperial Council of War at Vienna. Following this second round of purging, the villagers seemed content in the belief that they were now finally free of the vampire scourge.
    Part of the reason these two cases caught the public imagination so powerfully was that they were so well documented and involved official government investigations, lending them an air of credibility. Picked up by a hungry press, they were told and retold across Europe with a speed faster than ever before. Theologians and philosophers debated their existence, and writers cashed in on the stories. The problem worsened even more when credulous peasants, caught up in the fervor, began digging up and desecrating bodies at an alarming rate. Dismayed by the increasing trend, Empress Maria Theresa of Austria ordered her personal physician, Gerhard van Swieten, to investigate the