The Medveđa Vampire Outbreak and Arnold Paole

Medveđa sat on the West Morava, in what is now Trstenik municipality in Serbia. In the 1720s it was a border village of the Habsburg Kingdom of Serbia, facing Ottoman territory. Its men served as hajduks, border militiamen, and one of them was Arnold Paole. He told people a vampire had plagued him near "Cossowa" in Turkish Serbia. He said he had rid himself of it by eating earth from the vampire's grave and smearing himself with its blood.

Around 1725, Paole broke his neck falling from a hay wagon. Twenty to thirty days after his death, villagers said he was attacking them. Four people died. On the advice of the village hadnack, they opened his grave about forty days after burial.

The body was intact. Fresh blood ran from his eyes, nose, mouth and ears. His old nails and skin had fallen off and new ones had grown. When the stake went through his heart, he "made a clearly audible groan." The body was burned to ash that same day, and so were his four victims.

About five years later, the deaths began again. Victims suffered stabbing pains in the side, long fevers and a sense of being throttled in sleep. Many died after two or three days. Families now slept together, two or three houses at a time, some keeping watch while others slept. They threatened to abandon the village unless the vampires were executed.

Stanoicka, the 20-year-old wife of a hajduk, went to bed healthy. At midnight she woke screaming in terror. Milloe, a hajduk's son who had died nine weeks earlier, had "throttled her by the neck." She grew weaker by the hour. On the third day she died.

Oberstleutnant Schnezzer feared a contagious epidemic and called in Glaser, the contagion doctor at Paraćin. On 12 December 1731 Glaser recorded 13 deaths in about six weeks. He found no contagious disease. He blamed fevers, pleurisy, malnutrition and hasty burials. Still, he recommended granting the villagers' request, to keep the large village calm.

In Belgrade, Botta Adorno ordered a second commission. On 7 January 1732 the regimental surgeon Johann Flückinger, with Siegele and Johann Friedrich Baumgarten, examined 17 bodies. Twelve, they wrote, were "quite complete and undecayed." Miliza, emaciated in life, lay "unusually fat." Stanoicka had a finger-length blue bruise below her right ear.

Roma beheaded the vampires, burned the bodies and threw the ashes into the Morava. Flückinger signed his report in Belgrade on 26 January 1732. He made no ruling on whether vampires were real.

The report was printed in Nuremberg and reviewed in more than a hundred gazette articles. On 16 March 1731/32 the Grub-Street Journal wrote of dead bodies "called here Vampyres", the first known English use of the word. Sceptics answered. Calmet blamed fearful delusion and misread decomposition, and Gerard van Swieten pointed to natural causes and hallucination. In 1988 Paul Barber argued that ordinary decomposition explains the findings: bloating, purge fluid at the mouth and nose, slipping skin. Cold January ground slows decay, and trapped air forced out by a stake can sound like a groan.

Rousseau called the vampire story the best-attested history in the world. The case is credited with bringing the word "vampire" into Western European languages. The Austrian State Archives still hold Flückinger's report, and a local association plans a museum of Serbian mythological beings in the village's old school.