There is no more terrifying figure than the vampire, a corpse which leaves its grave during the night in order to feast on the blood of the living and turn them into vampires. Most of us are familiar with ways to kill them and to protect ourselves: driving a stake through the heart, covering ourselves with garlic, carrying the thorns of wild roses or wearing silver crosses.

But are tales of blood-sucking cadavers more than mere legend? Do vampires really exist?

Since the beginning of civilization there have been stories in every culture of the undead drinking blood, vampire-like entities which prey on the living, Indian vampires called rakshasas appear in the Vedas in 1500 B.C. Malaysian vampires are called penanggalen, a bodiless head that feeds on children. The ancient Greeks and Romans believed in lamia, strigoi, or vrykolas, and the Chinese vampire is called xiang shi.

Vampires are depicted in wall paintings discovered in the Indus Valley. They are over 5,000 years old and show vampire-like gods with prominent fangs. One of them in Nepal shows a figure drinking blood.

The best documented historical case of vampirism occurred in the early eighteenth century in 1727, a Serbian soldier, Arnold Poale, was stationed in Greece, where he claimed to have been attacked by a vampire. Shortly afterwords he fell from a hay wagon and died. His body was buried in the town cemetery, but one month later villagers reported seeing him walking around town.

The villagers remembered Arnold’s claim to have been attacked by a vampire, so they exhumed his body. The undecayed body had moved in the grave, and there was fresh blood on its lips. His clothes were covered in blood, and though his fingernails had fallen off, new ones had grown in their place. Despite having been dead for several weeks, when they drove a stake thought his heart he screamed and fresh blood gushed from the wound. The burned the body and scattered the ashes. Five years later seventeen villagers fell ill and died. When their bodies were later exhumed under the orders of Charles VI, Emperor of Austria, most of them showed the same signs as Poale’s corpse, well-fed, with fresh blood around the lips. All of these bodies were decapitated and burned. These cases are described in detail in a document called “Visum et Repertum” (“Seen and Discovered”), a report written in 1732 by the man who oversaw the exhumations, Johannes Fluckinger, The Regimental Field Surgeon to the Emperor.

There have been several sightings of a vampire in Highgate Cemetary in London. The first was in1967 when two sixteen year old girls walked past the North Gate and saw dead bodies coming out of the tombs. One of the girls, Elizabeth Wojdyla, had nightmares after her ordeal and claimed that the creature tried to attack her while she slept. She described a creature with animal eyes and sharp teeth. She was examined by the Catholic Church and vampire hunter, Sean Manchester, who discovered two punctures in her neck. His theory that she had been attacked by a vampire was strengthened when garlic and holy water seemed to cure her.

In November 1215, the Catholic Church officially recognized the existence of vampires during the Fourth Lateran Council of Catholic Church Leaders in Rome.