Arnold Paole, One Of Europe’s First Real Vampires
Public DomainA 19th-century depiction of the exhumation of a vampire.
In the early 18th century, Arnold Paole had the bad luck of falling off a hay wagon and breaking his neck. Then, after he was buried, he had even worse luck when people in his Serbian village became convinced he was a vampire.
As National Geographic reports, the modern vampire myth arguably began with the story of Paole’s exhumation, which spread across Europe and became a subject of interest to philosophers like Voltaire, Denis Diderot, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Filled with bloody, gory details, it triggered a superstition about vampires that endures to the modern day.
In some ways, Paole’s story bears a remarkable resemblance to Mercy Brown’s. After he died, dozens of other people in his village also died, which made the living suspicious that Paole was undead and sucking their blood.
Chronicle/Alamy Stock PhotoAfter exhuming Arnold Paole, his fellow villagers drove a stake through his heart.
Austrian authorities sent a military doctor named Johannes Flückinger to investigate the claims. He watched as the villagers dug up Paole’s body 40 days after his death and penned a shocking report to his superiors in 1732 describing what he saw.
“[They] found that fresh blood had flowed from his 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,” Flückinger wrote.
Even more shockingly, Flückinger reported that Paole’s corpse groaned and bled profusely when the villagers drove a stake through his heart. “[T]hey saw from this that he was a real vampire,” the doctor wrote.