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Peter Plogojowitz had been dead for about ten weeks when the people of Kisiljevo decided they needed to dig him back up.

Not because there was any question about whether Peter was actually dead.

They believed he was killing them.

It was the summer of 1725, and over the course of about a week, nine people in the small Serbian village had died after becoming sick. According to the report that survives from the time, their illnesses were short. Some died within about twenty-four hours.

Before they died, though, several of them reportedly said something strange.

Peter had come to them while they were sleeping.

They claimed the dead man had lain on them and throttled them. Soon afterward, they became sick.

There was also Peter’s widow.

She said her husband had appeared to her after his death asking for his shoes.

Then she left the village.

By the time imperial official Ernst Frombald became involved, the people of Kisiljevo had already decided what was happening.

Peter was coming back from the dead.

And they wanted his grave opened.

Frombald was hesitant. He wanted permission from authorities in Belgrade before allowing an exhumation, which was probably a fairly reasonable response to a group of people asking you to help dig up their dead neighbor.

The villagers were not interested in waiting.

They feared that if something wasn’t done, more people would die. They even threatened to abandon the village if Frombald refused to allow the grave to be opened.

So he agreed.

Peter’s body was dug up.

And what they found only convinced the villagers that they had been right.

Frombald described the corpse as being in surprisingly good condition. Aside from changes to the nose, Frombald reported far less decomposition than they expected to find. The old skin appeared to have peeled away, with what looked like new skin underneath. His hair, beard and nails appeared to have grown.

Then there was his mouth.

There appeared to be fresh blood inside it.

Today, several of those details have perfectly ordinary explanations. Bodies can do some very strange things after death, especially if you don’t know what decomposition actually looks like.

But the people standing around Peter’s open grave in 1725 didn’t have that knowledge.

They had something else.

Nine dead neighbors.

Stories from the dying that Peter had visited them.

A corpse that didn’t look nearly as dead as they thought it should.

And blood in its mouth.

To them, that was enough.

A wooden stake was driven through Peter’s body. Frombald reported that blood appeared at the mouth and ears when it happened.

Afterward, the villagers burned the corpse.

Frombald documented what he had witnessed, while also making it clear that he had been reluctant to participate without authorization. His account eventually reached Vienna and appeared in the Wienerisches Diarium on July 21, 1725.

It would be easy to read that story almost three hundred years later and wonder how anyone could possibly have believed Peter Plogojowitz was climbing out of his grave and killing his neighbors.

But Peter wasn’t an isolated case.

And the people of Kisiljevo were far from the only ones opening graves.

Welcome to History After Dark.
The kind of history that didn’t quite make it into your textbooks.

Long before Dracula became the image most of us associate with vampires, people were afraid of something considerably less glamorous.

The dead coming back.

Not necessarily as immortal, fanged creatures hunting for blood, either. Depending on where you were and when, beliefs about the restless dead looked different. Stories changed from one community to another, and so did the ways people thought the dead could harm the living.

Sometimes the dead were blamed when people became sick.

Sometimes when several members of the same family died.

Sometimes when an entire village seemed to be losing people and nobody could explain why.

And that last part matters.

Because the history of vampire panics is also a history of disease.

People were watching their husbands, wives, parents and children become sick, sometimes one after another. They didn’t know about bacteria or viruses. They didn’t understand tuberculosis the way we do now. They certainly didn’t have the benefit of modern forensic knowledge when they opened a grave and found a body that didn’t look the way they expected it to.

They were trying to explain something terrifying with the information they had.

Sometimes that explanation was a vampire.

And once you start looking through the historical record, Peter Plogojowitz stops looking like a bizarre exception.

Because only a few years later, another case would become even more famous.

This time, the authorities wouldn’t just send an official to watch.

They would send doctors.

 

The Vampire of Medveđa

Only a few years after the Peter Plogojowitz case, another Serbian village found itself dealing with something strangely familiar. This time, the dead man was Arnold Paole.

Well…sort of.

That’s the name you’ll usually see when you read about him today, but the surviving German report calls him Arnont Paule, and his name has been spelled several different ways over the last three hundred years. That’s one of the fun parts of researching people from the 1700s. Sometimes you spend twenty minutes wondering if you’ve accidentally found an entirely different person.

For the sake of my sanity—and yours—I’m calling him Arnold Paole.

Paole had been a soldier before settling in the village of Medveđa, another part of Serbia under Habsburg control.

And apparently, Arnold already had some experience with vampires.

According to the report that would later document his case, he had told people that while serving in what the document called “Turkish Serbia,” he had been troubled by one.

He also claimed he had protected himself in a way I personally would not recommend.

He dug up the vampire’s grave, took some of the earth from it and ate it. Then he smeared himself with the vampire’s blood.

Apparently, this was supposed to keep him from becoming a vampire himself.

It did not go according to plan.

Some time after returning home, Arnold fell from a hay wagon, badly injured himself and died.

Then, within weeks of his burial, people began claiming they had seen him.

Four people reportedly said Arnold had tormented them after his death.

All four died.

So the villagers did what people apparently did when a dead neighbor refused to stay politely dead.

They dug him up.

And if Peter Plogojowitz’s corpse had looked suspicious, Arnold’s wasn’t going to make anybody feel better.

His body reportedly had not decomposed the way the villagers expected. They found what they described as fresh blood around his mouth. His hair, beard and nails appeared to have grown, and his skin looked as though it had renewed itself.

To the people standing around his grave, Arnold hadn’t successfully protected himself from the vampire that supposedly tormented him.

He had become one.

So they drove a stake through his heart.

According to the account, Arnold’s corpse bled and let out a groan when the stake went through him.

Then they burned his body.

You would think that would be the end of it.

It wasn’t.

The villagers believed Arnold had also attacked cattle. People later ate meat from those cattle, and this became part of the explanation for how the vampire problem continued spreading through Medveđa.

I had to stop on that detail when I first came across it, because when you strip away the vampire part, there’s something strangely familiar about the logic.

Something harmful passes from one thing to another.

The cattle become involved.

People eat the cattle.

Those people are affected.

Then it spreads again.

They didn’t understand infection or disease transmission the way we do now, and I don’t want to pretend their vampire explanation was some early version of germ theory. It wasn’t.

But they were trying to figure out why death seemed to move through a community.

And they weren’t finished trying.

A few years later, people in Medveđa started dying again.

This time, the authorities sent doctors.

When the Doctors Opened the Graves

In December 1731, another investigation was ordered in Medveđa. Eventually a military medical team arrived, led by regimental surgeon Johann Flückinger.

And this is where Arnold Paole’s story becomes especially useful to us, because Flückinger and the men with him left behind something much better than a legend passed from person to person.

They left paperwork.

The report is called Visum et Repertum, usually translated along the lines of “Seen and Found” or “Seen and Discovered.”

And yes, we actually tracked this thing down during the research for this article.

I may have been a little too excited about finding a nearly three-hundred-year-old report about alleged vampires, but here we are.

The investigators questioned people in the village and opened graves to examine the bodies themselves.

Not every corpse they saw looked unusual.

That part is important.

Some showed the signs of decomposition the investigators expected to find.

Others made them stop.

One of those bodies belonged to a woman named Stana.

According to the report, Stana had previously admitted that she had smeared herself with the blood of a vampire because she was afraid of becoming one. She later died following childbirth.

When her grave was opened weeks after her death, the investigators described her body as unusually well preserved. They reported liquid blood in the chest and heart, internal organs that appeared fresh and changes to the skin and nails that they considered abnormal.

They examined other bodies too, including children.

And after comparing what they found, the medical team decided that some of the corpses were in what they described as a “vampire condition.”

Think about that for a second.

These weren’t villagers secretly opening graves in the middle of the night.

Military medical personnel had been sent there. They examined the bodies, wrote down what they saw and signed their names to it.

Then the bodies they considered vampires were beheaded and burned, and the ashes were thrown into the river.

That doesn’t prove they found vampires.

Obviously.

But it does leave us with something much more interesting than a spooky story somebody told around a fire.

The investigation actually happened.

The graves were opened.

The bodies were examined.

And the men examining them genuinely had to figure out what they were looking at.

Their report began circulating, and suddenly stories that might otherwise have stayed within villages in Serbia were traveling much farther.

People elsewhere in Europe could read about the vampires of Medveđa.

And naturally, they had opinions.

Physicians, theologians, scholars and government officials became involved in arguments over what these reports actually meant. Were people really returning from the dead? Was there some natural explanation? Were frightened villagers simply seeing what they expected to see?

Europe had basically stumbled into a vampire debate.

Which is a sentence I didn’t expect to write when I started researching this.

But there was one major problem with trying to settle it.

Nobody involved understood decomposition the way we do now.

What Does a Dead Body Actually Look Like?

I think this is one of the easiest things to overlook when reading these accounts.

Most of us have an idea of what a dead body is supposed to look like.

The problem is that a decomposing body does not always cooperate with that idea.

And unless you’ve actually studied decomposition—which I had not before falling into this particular research hole—some completely normal postmortem changes sound horrifying.

Take the blood around the mouth.

That detail appears over and over in vampire stories, and I understand why it scared people. If you suspect someone has been climbing out of a grave and feeding on the living, opening their coffin and finding reddish fluid around their mouth is about the worst possible thing you could see.

Except it doesn’t mean the corpse has been drinking blood.

As the body decomposes, bacteria break down tissue and gases begin building inside it. Those gases cause bloating and can push fluid from inside the body out through the nose and mouth.

That fluid can be dark.

It can be reddish.

It can look like blood.

Then there are the fingernails and hair.

They don’t keep growing after death, despite the old myth.

The skin around them dries and retracts, which can expose more of the nail and hair that was already there.

So the nails look longer.

The beard looks longer.

And suddenly the dead guy you already suspect of being a vampire appears to have been growing hair in his coffin.

Skin can blister and separate too, sometimes leaving fresher-looking tissue underneath. That may help explain descriptions of corpses appearing to have shed their old skin for new.

Bloating can make a body look surprisingly full instead of wasted away.

And if you drive a stake into a bloated corpse filled with gas and fluid?

Things may come out.

There may even be sounds.

Which brings us back to Arnold Paole supposedly groaning when they staked him.

Knowing all of that now makes these old reports much easier to understand.

But the villagers didn’t know it.

Even the medical men examining the bodies didn’t have modern forensic pathology sitting on a shelf somewhere for reference.

They were looking at real physical changes. They just didn’t understand what caused them.

And I think that’s an important difference.

It’s easy to sit here in 2026 and laugh at someone for seeing a vampire in a decomposing corpse.

It’s a little harder when you imagine standing in that cemetery without knowing any of this.

People around you are dying.

You’ve opened the grave of someone believed to be responsible.

His body is bloated instead of skeletal.

His beard looks longer.

His skin looks different.

There’s something that looks like blood around his mouth.

And when somebody drives a stake into him, blood and gas come out.

If you already believed vampires were possible?

I’m not sure that experience was going to change your mind.

It probably confirmed it.

And disease was still the bigger problem.

Because people weren’t opening graves just because corpses looked strange.

They were opening them because the living kept dying.

That connection between disease and the dead didn’t disappear with the eighteenth-century vampire panic, either.

More than a hundred years later, it showed up again during a cholera epidemic in Russia.

The woman at the center of that story was named Justina Yuschkov.

 

The Strange Case of Justina Yuschkov

Before I tell you what supposedly happened to Justina Yuschkov in 1848, I need to tell you something about the source.

Because finding this woman was a nightmare.

Not because her name doesn’t appear in books about vampire history. It does.

The problem is that every time I tried to figure out where the story originally came from, the source sent me somewhere else.

One book led to another.

That one led to a nineteenth-century German text.

The German text pointed toward a Russian publication.

And eventually I found myself searching Russian library catalogs for an 1872 issue of Nedelya, trying to locate the source for something that supposedly happened twenty-four years earlier.

I never found that original article.

So, unlike Peter Plogojowitz and Arnold Paole, I can’t put a contemporary 1848 document in front of you and say, here it is.

What I can do is trace the story backward far enough to know that it existed in nineteenth-century sources.

And I think that distinction matters.

The version we can trace says that Justina Yuschkov was the first person in her area to die during a cholera outbreak in August 1848.

Then the epidemic got worse.

According to the later account preserved by August Löwenstimm, a local medical officer named Rubtsov told the villagers that a woman who had died while pregnant was the cause of the sickness.

And that is where things took a very dark turn.

The villagers were reportedly told that if they wanted the cholera to stop, they needed to open Justina’s grave and examine her body.

Specifically, they were supposed to find out whether an unborn child was still inside her and whether her mouth was open.

If her mouth was open, a stake was supposed to be driven into it.

At first, the villagers apparently refused.

But the cholera kept spreading.

So eventually, desperation won.

They opened Justina’s grave.

They removed her body from the coffin.

And then they cut her open.

According to the account, they were looking for the unborn child they had been told might still be inside her.

They didn’t find one.

Then they searched the coffin and reportedly found the body of a baby there instead.

After that, they put Justina back into the grave.

But before covering her again, they drove an ashen stake into her because her mouth had been found open.

Then they filled in the grave and went home believing they had finally done something that might stop the epidemic.

That detail—the open mouth—shows up in other Slavic beliefs about dangerous or restless dead people too.

And it’s one of those moments where this whole subject gets stranger the more you look at it.

Because the fear wasn’t always that a corpse was physically climbing out of the ground every night.

Sometimes the body itself was treated almost like the source of the problem.

An open mouth.

A swollen corpse.

A body that hadn’t decomposed enough.

Something about the dead person was still active, still connected to the sickness moving through the living.

And if that was the problem, then changing the body might change what was happening outside the grave.

That is where the stake came in.

Not as something dramatic from a horror movie.

As a remedy.

What makes Justina’s story especially disturbing to me isn’t only what was done to her corpse.

It’s the fact that the person allegedly telling the villagers what to do was a medical officer.

If Löwenstimm’s account is accurate, this wasn’t simply a village deciding on its own that a vampire was spreading cholera.

A man associated with medicine supposedly gave them instructions.

That doesn’t make the story easier to verify.

But it does make it more complicated.

Because this is one of those cases where folklore and medicine don’t sit neatly on opposite sides of the room.

They overlap.

And sometimes the person with the title is still working inside the same fears and assumptions as everyone else.

Cholera was killing people, and nobody around Justina had the tools we have now to understand what was actually happening.

Today, we know cholera is caused by infection with Vibrio cholerae, usually spread through contaminated food or water.

They didn’t know that.

They knew people were dying.

They knew the outbreak had started with Justina.

And someone told them the dead woman might be responsible.

That’s enough to make the logic of the grave-opening easier to follow, even if it still sounds horrifying.

There’s one more reason I wanted to include Justina even though her source trail is much shakier than Peter’s, Arnold’s or Mercy Brown’s.

She shows us that these beliefs didn’t simply vanish once doctors and officials started documenting vampire cases in the eighteenth century.

More than a hundred years had passed since Peter Plogojowitz’s grave was opened.

Medicine had changed.

Europe had changed.

The world had changed.

And people were still capable of looking toward the dead when disease moved through a community.

But Justina’s story also gives us a warning about historical research itself.

Stories change as they travel.

Names get translated and transliterated.

One writer cites another writer, who cites another source, and eventually something that started as a report becomes a sentence in a modern book with very little indication of how far removed it is from the original event.

That’s why I’m not going to tell you that we know exactly what happened at Justina Yuschkov’s grave in 1848.

We don’t.

We have a later nineteenth-century account describing what supposedly happened, and we can trace that account backward only so far.

Sometimes that is simply as far as the historical record will let you go.

Which brings us to our last grave.

Because forty-four years after Justina was allegedly exhumed during a cholera outbreak in Russia, another family was watching a disease move from one person to the next.

This time, we don’t have to chase the story through nineteenth-century citations to find out what happened.

The newspapers were there.

The place was Exeter, Rhode Island.

The disease was consumption.

And the woman they dug up was Mercy Brown.

 

Mercy Brown and the Vampire in New England

By the time Mercy Brown’s grave was opened in 1892, vampires had already been appearing in European reports for well over a century.

But this wasn’t Serbia.

It wasn’t an isolated eighteenth-century village.

This was Rhode Island.

And it was 1892.

That date kept bothering me while I was researching Mercy’s story.

The first gasoline-powered automobile had already been patented. Electric lights existed. The telephone existed. Robert Koch had identified the bacterium responsible for tuberculosis ten years earlier.

And in Exeter, Rhode Island, people were about to open the graves of three women to find out whether one of them was killing a member of her family from beyond the grave.

The Brown family had been dealing with consumption for years.

Mercy’s mother, Mary Eliza Brown, died from the disease in December 1883.

Then Mercy’s older sister, Mary Olive, became sick.

She died the following June.

For a while, the family seems to have had some relief.

Then Mercy’s brother Edwin became ill.

Consumption had already taken his mother and sister, and now he was showing the same signs.

Edwin traveled away from Rhode Island for a time, hoping that a different climate might improve his health. That was a fairly common treatment for tuberculosis before effective medications existed.

It didn’t cure him.

And while Edwin was sick, another Brown child developed consumption.

Mercy.

She died on January 17, 1892.

She was nineteen years old.

Because it was winter and the ground was frozen, Mercy’s body could not immediately be buried in the cemetery. Instead, her coffin was kept in a receiving vault until the ground softened enough for burial.

That detail is about to become very important.

Edwin was still alive.

But he was getting worse.

And people in the community began suggesting that maybe the problem wasn’t only consumption.

Maybe one of the dead Brown women was somehow feeding on him.

George Brown, Mercy and Edwin’s father, reportedly wasn’t convinced.

I keep coming back to him when I read this story.

This man had already buried his wife.

Then a daughter.

Then another daughter.

Now his son was dying from the same disease.

Whether George believed in vampires almost feels beside the point by then. People around him believed something might be done, and eventually he agreed to let the graves be opened.

On March 17, 1892, they did it.

First came Mary Eliza.

She had been dead for more than eight years.

Her body showed the decomposition they expected.

Then Mary Olive.

She had been dead for nearly eight years.

Again, nothing particularly suspicious.

And then they opened Mercy’s coffin.

Mercy had been dead for only about two months.

She had also spent much of that time inside a cold receiving vault during a Rhode Island winter.

Her body was therefore much better preserved than those of her mother and sister.

We know exactly why that would happen now.

Cold slows decomposition.

But imagine being there without beginning from that explanation.

Two bodies are badly decomposed.

The third looks strangely preserved.

And the third belongs to the person who died most recently while her brother continued wasting away.

A physician was present for the examination.

Mercy’s body was inspected, and her heart was removed. Contemporary reports described blood being found in the heart, while later accounts also describe other organs being removed.

Once again, there it was.

The same kind of detail that had terrified people opening graves on the other side of the Atlantic generations earlier.

Blood in a dead body.

Except this time, we aren’t reading about it in an eighteenth-century report from Serbia.

We have newspaper coverage.

Two days later, the Providence Journal published a story under the headline:

“EXHUMED THE BODIES: Testing a Horrible Superstition in the Town of Exeter.”

And I have to admit, finding the newspaper coverage for this case made Mercy feel different from the others.

I’ve spent hours chasing Justina Yuschkov through books, citations and nineteenth-century publications trying to work backward toward a source I never completely recovered.

With Mercy, people were writing about what happened almost immediately.

The newspapers described the graves being opened.

They described the condition of the bodies.

They described Mercy’s heart.

And they described what happened next.

Her heart was burned.

Later accounts describe the ashes being mixed with liquid and given to Edwin as a remedy, in the hope that whatever was draining the life from him could somehow be stopped.

There are variations in the surviving accounts about some of the details—including exactly which organs were removed and what was done with the remains afterward—so I don’t want to pretend the historical record is cleaner than it actually is.

But the central part of the story is clear.

Mercy’s body was opened.

Her heart was removed and burned.

And all of it was done while her brother was still dying from the same disease that had killed her.

I cannot imagine what that was like for Edwin.

His nineteen-year-old sister had been dead for two months.

Her coffin had been opened.

Her body had been examined.

Her heart had been removed and burned.

And according to the story that survived, some of what remained was turned into a remedy meant to save him.

But there was no vampire feeding on Edwin Brown.

He had tuberculosis.

And tuberculosis did not care what they had done to Mercy’s body.

Edwin died on May 2, 1892.

Less than two months after the exhumation.

The Vampire Nobody Called a Vampire

There is something else about Mercy Brown’s story that I think is worth clearing up.

The word vampire has become almost impossible to separate from her.

She gets called the “last New England vampire,” the “last American vampire,” and sometimes simply “Mercy Brown the vampire.”

But the New England belief surrounding consumption wasn’t necessarily the Dracula-style vampire most of us picture.

There didn’t need to be a corpse physically climbing out of its grave at night and biting people.

The fear was that somehow the dead were continuing to consume the life of surviving family members.

And when you remember what tuberculosis actually does to a person, the connection becomes a little easier to understand.

They called the disease consumption for a reason.

A person could slowly waste away.

They lost weight.

They became pale and weak.

They coughed.

They could cough up blood.

And sometimes one person in a household became sick after another.

To someone who didn’t understand how tuberculosis spread, it could look almost as though something was slowly draining the family.

George R. Stetson traveled through Rhode Island only a few years after Mercy’s exhumation and wrote about these beliefs in his 1896 article, The Animistic Vampire in New England.

The practice wasn’t unique to the Browns.

That surprised me when I first started researching Mercy.

Her story is famous now, but she wasn’t some bizarre one-time eruption of superstition in an otherwise completely rational New England town.

There had been other exhumations.

Other families had opened graves.

Other organs had been burned.

Mercy happened to become the most famous face attached to a much larger tradition.

And I think part of the reason we remember her is simply because of when it happened.

1892 was late enough for reporters to show up.

Late enough for physicians and newspapers to openly criticize what people were doing.

Late enough that the whole thing sounded old-fashioned even while it was happening.

But knowing that tuberculosis was caused by bacteria and actually being able to cure tuberculosis were two very different things.

There was no effective antibiotic treatment waiting for Edwin Brown.

Knowing the name of the thing killing your child doesn’t necessarily make you feel any less helpless when you can’t stop it.

And that brings me back to George.

Maybe he didn’t believe opening those graves would save Edwin.

Maybe part of him did.

Maybe after losing his wife and two daughters, he was simply willing to let people try something because his son was dying too.

I don’t think we can know exactly what was going through his mind that morning.

But I do think it’s worth remembering that underneath the vampire story was a real family watching consumption tear through their home.

Mercy wasn’t a monster.

She was a nineteen-year-old girl who died from the same disease that had already killed her mother and sister.

Then people opened her coffin because they were desperate to keep her brother alive.

And they failed.

That, more than anything supernatural, is what makes her story horrifying.

Four Graves, Four Different Moments

Peter Plogojowitz died in 1725.

Arnold Paole’s story emerged around the same period, with the later Medveđa investigation documented in 1732.

Justina Yuschkov’s alleged exhumation took place in 1848.

Mercy Brown died in 1892.

Different countries.

Different diseases.

Different beliefs about what the dead were capable of doing.

But every time I came back to these cases, I kept finding the same thing underneath them.

Someone was dying.

Then someone else became sick.

People didn’t understand why.

And eventually somebody looked toward a grave.

That is the part of the vampire panic I find much more interesting than whether anyone involved genuinely encountered something supernatural.

Because once you stop asking, “Did they really find a vampire?”

there’s a much better question waiting underneath it.

Why did opening the grave make sense to them?

And the answer has much less to do with vampires than I expected when I started researching this.

 

What We Know

We know Peter Plogojowitz was the subject of a 1725 investigation documented by imperial official Ernst Frombald. His grave was opened, his body was examined, and the villagers believed what they found proved he had become a vampire.

We know an official military-medical investigation took place in Medveđa several years later. Johann Flückinger and the other men involved examined bodies, recorded their findings in Visum et Repertum and documented the measures taken against corpses they believed showed signs associated with vampirism.

We know New England families really did exhume relatives during outbreaks of consumption. Mercy Brown’s exhumation happened in March 1892 and was reported in contemporary newspapers. Her heart was removed and burned. Later accounts describe the ashes being used as a remedy for her sick brother Edwin.

And we know the physical characteristics described in many vampire accounts—bloating, apparently longer hair and nails, skin changes, reddish fluid around the mouth and fluids escaping when a body is pierced—can occur naturally during decomposition.

What We Don’t Know

We don’t know exactly what happened in every grave.

The people writing these accounts were observing bodies through the medical knowledge, cultural beliefs and expectations of their own time. Even contemporary documentation tells us what someone reported seeing, which isn’t necessarily the same thing as having a modern forensic examination.

Justina Yuschkov is the clearest example of how careful we need to be.

We have a later nineteenth-century account describing an alleged 1848 exhumation during a cholera epidemic, but we were unable to recover the original Nedelya article at the end of the citation trail. That means we can’t treat every detail of her story with the same confidence we can give the surviving documentation surrounding Peter, Arnold or Mercy.

We also can’t know exactly what every person involved believed.

Some may have been completely convinced they were dealing with the restless dead. Others may have participated because their neighbors or families believed it. Some may simply have been desperate enough to try anything.

The documents can’t tell us what was happening inside everyone’s head.

What Probably Happened

There is no evidence that any of these people returned from the dead.

What we do have are diseases moving through families and communities, followed by graves being opened and bodies showing changes that people at the time did not fully understand.

Tuberculosis and cholera could kill more than one person in the same household or village. To people who did not understand exactly how those diseases spread, it could look as though death itself was moving from one person to the next.

Then, when a suspected corpse was exhumed, ordinary postmortem changes could look like proof.

A body might be swollen.
Hair and nails might appear longer.
Skin might look unusually fresh.
Reddish fluid might appear around the mouth.
A corpse preserved by cold might look far less decomposed than expected.

None of those things require a supernatural explanation.

But if you already suspected the dead, they could be very convincing.

 

Why the Dead?

After spending this much time reading about people digging up corpses, I kept coming back to one question.

Why the dead?

If people were dying from disease, why would anyone look toward someone who had already died and decide, That’s where the problem is?

Part of the answer is that illness didn’t always look random.

One person became sick and died. Then a brother became sick. Then a sister. Then a child.

The pattern was real, even if the explanation wasn’t.

Today, we understand that people living together share air, food, water and close contact. Infectious diseases can move through households for completely ordinary reasons.

But if you can see the pattern and can’t explain it, the first person who died can start to look important.

In New England, that sometimes meant opening the grave of a relative who had already died from consumption and looking for signs that the body was somehow still connected to the illness affecting the living.

And then something could be done.

I think that matters more than it first appears.

Imagine watching your family die one person at a time while every treatment available to you fails.

Someone tells you there is one more thing you can try.

Open the grave.

Examine the body.

Burn the heart.

Maybe you believe it.

Maybe you don’t.

But if the person still dying is your child, your brother or your spouse, “What if?” starts to carry a lot of weight.

That desperation also helps explain why the rituals varied so much.

Peter Plogojowitz was staked and burned.

Arnold Paole was staked, beheaded and burned.

According to the later account, Justina Yuschkov was exhumed, cut open and eventually staked after her mouth was found open.

Mercy Brown’s heart was removed and burned, while later accounts say the ashes were used as a remedy for Edwin.

There was no universal vampire rulebook.

Different communities had different ideas about what the dead could do and how to stop them.

But underneath all of those rituals was the same hope:

Maybe this will save the person who is still alive.

That changes the way I look at these stories.

The body in the grave wasn’t always a feared stranger.

Sometimes it was someone they loved.

And in at least some of these cases, what looks like violence toward the dead was really desperation for the living.

The rituals didn’t stop tuberculosis.

They didn’t stop cholera.

But they offered something medicine sometimes couldn’t.

Something to do.

 

What the Vampire Panics Were Really About

When I started researching this article, I expected the strangest part to be the graves.

The stakes. The burned organs. The bodies being dug back up because somebody thought the person inside might still be harming the living.

And, okay, those parts are still pretty strange.

But they aren’t what stayed with me.

What stayed with me were the people standing around those graves.

Someone was sick.

Then someone died.

Then somebody else got sick.

And nothing they tried seemed to stop it.

I don’t think Peter Plogojowitz climbed out of his grave.

I don’t think Arnold Paole became a vampire because he ate dirt from one grave and smeared himself with blood from another.

I don’t think Justina Yuschkov was spreading cholera from underground.

And I don’t think Mercy Brown was draining the life from her brother.

But I understand the fear behind those stories better than I did when I started.

Not the explanation.

The fear.

We have the luxury of knowing what bacteria are, how infectious disease spreads and what decomposition can do to a body.

They didn’t always have that knowledge.

And even when medicine could name the disease, it couldn’t necessarily cure it.

That may be the part that surprised me most.

The vampire wasn’t always replacing medicine.

Sometimes the vampire showed up where medicine ended.

A doctor could tell you your son had consumption.

Okay.

Now what?

If every treatment failed, all you could do was watch.

Unless someone told you there was one more thing you hadn’t tried.

I think that’s why I have a hard time laughing at these people.

Desperation makes people do strange things.

Grief does too.

And when both happen at the same time, even an impossible answer can start to feel worth trying.

Maybe that’s what the vampire panics were really about.

Not monsters.

Not even death, exactly.

They were about what happens when death refuses to make sense.

We like causes.

We like patterns.

We like believing that if we can figure out what is hurting us, maybe we can figure out how to make it stop.

The people in these stories got the cause wrong.

But the deaths were real.

The diseases were real.

The grief was real.

And the people inside those graves were real too.

Mercy Brown was a nineteen-year-old girl who died of tuberculosis.

Peter Plogojowitz was a man whose neighbors blamed him after his death.

Arnold Paole was a soldier whose story eventually brought military surgeons into a cemetery.

And somewhere behind the frustrating trail of citations surrounding Justina Yuschkov was a woman whose name became attached to an epidemic and a story about the restless dead.

History turned them into vampires afterward.

Maybe that’s why the graves aren’t the part I find most unsettling anymore.

It’s the thought of standing beside one.

Someone you knew is inside it.

Someone else you love is dying.

The doctors haven’t been able to stop it.

Your neighbors are telling you there might still be something you can do.

You don’t know that opening the grave won’t save anybody.

You only know that doing nothing hasn’t worked.

So you pick up the shovel.

And you dig.

 

Sources & Further Reading

Every History After Dark article is built from multiple sources whenever possible.

The history of vampire belief is particularly complicated because the surviving evidence ranges from eighteenth-century government reports and nineteenth-century newspaper accounts to folklore collections, medical research, and stories preserved long after the events themselves.

For this article, I compared contemporary and near-contemporary accounts with later historical, folkloric, and scientific research whenever possible. Some of the sources below are included because they preserve the stories themselves. Others help explain what may have been happening behind them.

Primary & Near-Contemporary Sources

Ernst Frombald. “Copia eines Schreibens aus dem Gradisker District in Ungarn.” Wienerisches Diarium, July 21, 1725.

The contemporary report concerning Peter Plogojowitz—Petar Blagojević—at Kisiljevo. Frombald described the villagers’ claims, the deaths attributed to Plogojowitz, the opening and examination of his grave, the condition of the corpse, and its eventual staking and burning. A manuscript copy of Frombald’s report also survives in the Austrian State Archives. Modern scholarship confirms that the newspaper version appeared on July 21, 1725. 

Johann Flückinger. Visum et Repertum. Über die so genannten Vampyrs, oder Blut-Aussauger, so zu Medvegy[a] in Servien, an der Türkischen Granitz… 1732.
Official military-medical report concerning the vampire investigation at Medveđa, Serbia. Flückinger, a regimental military surgeon, conducted the investigation with other medical and military personnel. The report was signed/attested at Belgrade in January 1732 and subsequently circulated widely in European print.

George R. Stetson. “The Animistic Vampire in New England.” American Anthropologist, vol. 9, no. 1, January 1896, pp. 1–13.

Written only a few years after the Mercy Brown exhumation, Stetson investigated surviving New England beliefs surrounding consumption and the dead. He documented Rhode Island exhumation practices, described the burning of organs, recorded conversations with people familiar with the practice, and compared New England beliefs with European vampire traditions. 

Contemporary newspaper coverage of the Brown family exhumations, March 1892.

Several newspapers reported the events at Exeter shortly after the Brown family graves were opened, including accounts circulated under headlines such as “Exhumed the Bodies: Testing a Horrible Superstition in the Town of Exeter” and “A Rhode Island Superstition: Belief That Consumption Is Nothing Less than an Invisible Vampire.”

These reports are especially useful because they preserve details close to the event itself, including the examination of the bodies, Mercy Brown’s condition, the discovery of blood in her heart, and the removal and burning of her organs.

Books & Scholarly Research

Paul Barber. Vampires, Burial, and Death: Folklore and Reality. Yale University Press, 1988.

One of the most important sources used throughout this article. Barber examines historical vampire reports alongside folklore, burial customs, disease, and the biological processes of decomposition. His book contains dedicated chapters on Peter Plogojowitz and Visum et Repertum, as well as extensive discussion of the physical characteristics historically interpreted as evidence of vampirism. 

Barber was also particularly important to our research into Justina Yuschkov, whose 1848 exhumation during a Russian cholera epidemic appears in his discussion of how revenant beliefs could become connected to contagious disease.

August Löwenstimm. Aberglaube und Strafrecht. Berlin: Carl Heymanns Verlag, 1897.

A major source behind Barber’s account of Justina Yuschkov. Löwenstimm describes the 1848 investigation into the exhumation of Yuschkov during a cholera outbreak and records the villagers’ explanation for what they had done.

The citation trail for this case ultimately points still farther backward to a Russian account published in Неделя (Nedelya), 1872, no. 2. We were able to trace that reference through nineteenth-century material and Russian library catalogs, although the exact Nedelya article itself could not be independently recovered during this research.

Because of that gap, Justina’s story should be treated as a later documented account of an alleged 1848 incident, rather than as though we possess a contemporary 1848 report.

Thomas M. Bohn. “A Historical-Critical Reading of the 1725 Frombald Letter on Vampirism in Kisiljevo.” Journal of Vampire Studies, vol. 5, 2025, pp. 4–20.

A detailed modern examination of Frombald’s original report concerning Peter Plogojowitz. Bohn places the case within Habsburg-controlled Serbia, epidemic fears, local burial customs, government administration, and the transmission of Frombald’s report through the European press. 

Bohn’s research is particularly valuable because it distinguishes what Frombald actually reported in 1725 from details that became attached to the story later.

Michael E. Bell. “Vampires and Death in New England, 1784 to 1892.” Anthropology and Humanism, vol. 31, no. 2, pp. 124–140.

A scholarly examination of New England’s so-called vampire tradition and its close relationship with tuberculosis, or consumption. Bell places cases such as Mercy Brown within a much larger regional pattern rather than treating Exeter as an isolated eruption of superstition. 

Research on European revenant and vampire folklore

Additional academic material consulted included work on European beliefs concerning revenants, fear of the dead, burial practices, and supernatural beings, including material concerning Slovenian and broader Slavic traditions. These sources were primarily used for cultural context rather than as evidence for the four individual cases.

Historical & Institutional Sources

Rhode Island Historical Society — “Have Mercy…”

Historical discussion of Mercy Brown, the Brown family, consumption, and Rhode Island’s vampire tradition. This was useful for comparing the surviving historical record with the version of Mercy’s story that entered popular folklore. 

Science History Institute — “Vampire Panic.”

Historical and scientific discussion of vampire panics, disease, decomposition, and the attempts communities made to explain epidemic deaths before the mechanisms of infection were fully understood. 

Australian Museum — Stages of Decomposition.

Used for modern scientific context concerning what happens to a human body after death. This helped distinguish ordinary postmortem changes from physical characteristics historically interpreted as evidence that a corpse remained somehow alive.

Additional Reading & Modern Retellings

Several modern articles and retellings were also consulted during the early stages of research. These were useful for identifying names, variations of the stories, and claims that could then be traced back to stronger historical sources.

• Immortal Perfumes — “Mercy Brown and the New England Vampire Panic”⁠
• Sky HISTORY — “3 Real People Behind the Modern Vampire Myth”⁠
• Listverse — “10 Creepy Historical Accounts of Real-Life Vampires”⁠
• The Terrifying Tale of Peter Plogojowitz — Vampires.com
• The True Story of Arnold Paole, Vampire of Meduegna, Serbia — Vocal
• A True New England Vampire Story — The Sun Times News

These sources were not treated as equivalent to contemporary documents or scholarly research. Where a modern retelling made a claim that could be checked against an earlier source, the earlier source was preferred.

The Research Trail

Some sources used during this project led to other sources rather than directly providing material for the final article.

That was especially true of the Justina Yuschkov case.

Research into her story moved backward through Paul Barber’s Vampires, Burial, and Death, Löwenstimm’s Aberglaube und Strafrecht, nineteenth-century German-language references, Russian biographical and bibliographical material, Russian National Library catalogs, and ultimately a citation to Nedelya, 1872, no. 2.

Not every link in that chain could be independently recovered.

Rather than filling those gaps with assumptions, I’ve tried to preserve the distinction between what the surviving source says, what an earlier source is reported to have said, and what we can actually verify today.

A Note on Sources

Vampire history has a strange habit of blurring the line between documentation and folklore.

Peter Plogojowitz and Arnold Paole appear in eighteenth-century reports written by officials who were confronted with communities convinced that the dead were harming the living. Mercy Brown’s story survives in contemporary newspaper coverage and in research conducted while New England’s consumption folklore was still within living memory. Justina Yuschkov reaches us through a more complicated chain of later sources.

And none of those sources exists in a vacuum.

The people writing them had their own beliefs, prejudices, medical knowledge and reasons for interpreting what they saw the way they did.

A corpse described as strangely preserved does not prove vampirism.

A community believing that the dead caused an epidemic does not mean the community invented the deaths.

And discovering a natural explanation for something described in a vampire account does not make the fear experienced by the people involved any less real.

Whenever possible, I compared multiple sources and separated contemporary documentation from later folklore and modern interpretation.

Because this article isn’t really about proving whether vampires existed.

It’s about something I find much more interesting.

Why, at certain moments in history, perfectly real people opened the graves of people they loved and became convinced that the dead were killing them.

History is often stranger than fiction.

See you next Friday.

— Destiny