Of all the ghouls lurking behind dark corners, vampires may be the most terrifying. Quick, fanged, and with an insatiable thirst for blood, they’ve haunted — and delighted — humans for centuries. So, are there examples of real vampires in history?
The answer is complicated — but not an outright no. In Europe and the United States, some people were dubbed vampires after they died, as their fellow townspeople believed that they continued to spread pestilence from the grave. They were dug up, marked as undead, and burned to ashes.
Today, there are even thousands of people who readily identify as vampires. And, yes, they drink human blood.
Read on to learn about nine real vampires from history, from serial killers and Serbian peasants to cruel leaders with insatiable bloodlust.
Mercy Brown, The ‘Vampire’ Of 19th-Century New England
A few months after her death, Mercy Brown was exhumed by townspeople in Exeter, Rhode Island, who suspected that she was a vampire feeding on the living.
To residents of the tiny town of Exeter, Rhode Island, George Brown’s family seemed to be suffering from a curse. In the second half of the 19th century, his wife Mary and his daughters Mary Olive and Mercy all died from tuberculosis. By 1892, his son Edwin, who was formerly a “big, husky young man,” also seemed near death. So, the locals decided to take action.
They suspected that it was not tuberculosis — then called consumption — that haunted the Brown family but something much more sinister. Locals began to fear that one of the Brown women was undead and feasting “on the living tissue and blood of Edwin.”
So, they convinced George to let them exhume and examine the bodies of Mary, Mary Olive, and Mercy. On March 17, 1892, a group of men marched into Chestnut Hill Cemetery with shovels and started to dig.
Tuberculosis was not well understood at the time of Mercy Brown’s death, and little could be done to cure those who suffered from it.
In Mary and Mary Olive’s caskets, the townspeople found only bones. But Mercy — who had died just two months earlier — still looked very human. There was blood in her veins and a flush in her cheeks.
“The body was in a fairly well-preserved state,” a correspondent from the Providence Journal later reported, according to Smithsonian Magazine. “The heart and liver were removed, and in cutting open the heart, clotted and decomposed blood was found.”
Though a local doctor insisted that this was perfectly normal given the short amount of time since Mercy’s death, the townspeople took it as a sure sign that she was a vampire. They burned her heart and liver, mixed the ashes with water, and had Edwin drink the concoction.
Unsurprisingly, this didn’t do much. Edwin died a few months later.
Richard Chase, The Vampire Of Sacramento
Serial killer Richard Chase was obsessed with drinking blood.
If there’s one thing people know about vampires, it’s that they drink blood. So Richard Chase, a blood-obsessed serial killer who murdered at least six people in the 1970s, certainly qualifies as a real-life vampire.
Known as the “Dracula Killer,” Chase displayed sociopathic tendencies from a young age. He set small fires and was cruel toward animals. As he grew older, he also began to suffer from delusions that his heart had stopped and that he was a walking corpse. Chase developed an obsession with blood and was institutionalized after attempting to inject himself with rabbit blood.
Though he was briefly held in a psychiatric facility — where fellow patients allegedly observed Chase drinking the blood of birds he caught and killed — Chase was released in 1976. Shortly thereafter, he turned his attention to humans.
A jury found that Richard Chase was sane and sentenced him to death. However, he died by suicide in prison.
On Dec. 29, 1977, Chase killed his first known victim, Ambrose Griffin, in Sacramento, California. Chase shot Griffin as he helped his wife unload groceries from their car. Less than a month later, on Jan. 23, 1978, he shot Teresa Wallin after entering her home through an unlocked door. He then stabbed her and drank her blood, allegedly using a yogurt container as a cup.
Four days after that, Chase killed four people at once after entering another home through an unlocked door: Evelyn Miroth, her six-year-old son Jason, her 22-month-old nephew David Ferreira, and her friend Daniel Meredith. HISTORY reports that Chase removed Miroth’s organs, filled them with blood, and took them home with him.
Though police were able to track Chase down quickly, they found even more horrors at his apartment. Human blood was everywhere — in his sink, on his utensils, and even in his blender. It appeared that this real-life vampire had been drinking blood for quite some time. He was found guilty of first-degree murder and sent to prison, where he died by suicide on Dec. 26, 1980.
Vlad The Impaler, The Possible Inspiration For Bram Stoker’s ‘Dracula’
Vlad the Impaler was known for impaling his enemies, and some claim that he even dipped his bread in their blood.
Our modern-day conception of vampires was largely sculpted by Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula. Dracula, of course, is about a fearsome vampire who hunts human victims and drinks their blood. And Stoker drew some inspiration from a real vampire — the violent Wallachian ruler Vlad Dracula.
Born between 1428 and 1431, Vlad spent the first part of his life as a hostage with his younger brother Radu in the Ottoman Empire. There, he was possibly tortured and may have witnessed the impalement of the Ottomans’ foes, a technique he’d later infamously use on his own enemies.
After Vlad’s father and older brother were overthrown in a coup, Vlad went home to Wallachia. He was able to wrest power back from his father’s enemies, but Vlad never forgot what they had done to his family. Before long, he set out to establish dominance in the most violent way imaginable.
Vlad hosted a banquet and invited those who had opposed him. He never intended to listen to their concerns, however. Those who continued to resist him were rounded up and bloodily impaled on spikes. And, thus, Vlad Dracula became known as “Vlad the Impaler.”
From there, Vlad the Impaler’s bloody reputation only grew. In a 1462 letter to an ally describing his campaigns against the Ottoman Empire, Vlad boasted of killing “peasants, men and women, old and young… We killed 23,884 Turks.” By the time he was imprisoned by the Hungarians, Vlad had killed an estimated 80,000 people, tens of thousands of whom were impaled.
Vlad had also shown a fondness for human blood, as evidenced by claims that he dipped his bread in blood before he ate it. Though this particular assertion has never been verified, many of Vlad’s vicious deeds have been — and they supposedly inspired Stoker as he prepared to write his iconic vampire novel.
Arnold Paole, One Of Europe’s First Real Vampires
A 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.
After 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.
Fritz Haarmann, The ‘Vampire Of Hanover’ Who Killed His Victims With A ‘Love Bite’
Fritz Haarmann killed his victims with a “love bite,” which led to his moniker, the Vampire of Hanover.
To those who knew him, Fritz Haarmann seemed harmless, if a little odd. But Haarmann was, in fact, a fearful killer who targeted young boys and men. He killed at least 24 victims between 1918 and 1924 in Hanover, Germany.
Known as the “Vampire of Hanover” because he often bit his victims through the windpipe — in what Haarmann called a “love bite” — this real vampire hunted for young men at Hanover’s train stations. There, teenage runaways fleeing postwar hardships were easy to lure back to his apartment, where Haarmann promised to give them a good meal.
Then, after feeding his victims, Haarmann would attack. He’d strangle them or bite through their windpipe, sexually molest their bodies, and dismember them. Haarmann dumped many of their corpses into the nearby Leine River, but he also ground up their remains into meat that he sold as pork.
Investigators inspecting a stove at Fritz Haarmann’s apartment, which he used to burn the remains of some of his victims.
In May 1924, children playing along the riverbank found a human skull and bones, which led to the discovery of more than a dozen sets of human remains. Suspicion quickly fell on Haarmann, who had been observed attacking a young boy in the train station. Investigators went to his apartment and found blood on the walls and floors and clothing belonging to his victims.
After he was arrested, Haarmann readily confessed. He eventually claimed that he’d killed upwards of 70 young boys or men, but he was found guilty of 24 murders. He was sentenced to die by guillotine in 1925 at Hanover Prison.
His last words were quite vampiric: “I repent, but I do not fear death.”
Peter Plogojowitz, Another Real-Life Vampire From Serbia
Villagers in Plogojowitz’s village claimed on their deathbeds that he had come to them in their sleep and strangled them.
Like Arnold Paole, the next real vampire on our list died in Serbia in the 18th century. And like Paole, Peter Plogojowitz was exhumed by his fellow villagers out of fear that he was an undead bloodsucker.
In the weeks after Plogojowitz died, a number of his fellow villagers also perished after suffering from a mysterious 24-hour illness. The dead were both young and old, and many made a terrifying claim on their deathbeds. They said that Plogojowitz had come to them in their sleep and strangled them. Even Plogojowitz’s wife claimed that her husband had visited her in her sleep (though she said that he’d just wanted a pair of shoes).
The villagers decided to exhume Plogojowitz’s body and search him for telltale signs of vampirism. According to Vampires, Burial, and Death: Folklore and Reality by Paul Barber, they asked a parish priest and an imperial provisor to be present during the exhumation. Reluctantly, the provisor agreed — and recorded what he witnessed.
Peter Plogojowitz’s body was exhumed to check for signs of vampirism — which the townspeople allegedly found.
“First of all I did not detect the slightest odor that is otherwise characteristic of the dead,” the provisor wrote. “[T]he body, except for the nose, which was somewhat fallen away, was completely fresh… Not without astonishment, I saw some fresh blood in his mouth, which, according to the common observation, he had sucked from the people killed by him.”
As in Paole’s exhumation, the townspeople quickly sharpened a stake, which they plunged into Plogojowitz’s chest. To the provisor’s shock, fresh blood flowed from his ears and mouth. Other “wild” things also happened which the provisor declined to detail, writing: “I pass [them] by out of high respect.”
Plogojowitz’s body was then burned to ashes. Unlike in the case of Mercy Brown, however, it doesn’t seem that anyone consumed them.
Elizabeth Báthory, The ‘Blood Countess’ Who May Have Killed Hundreds Of Girls
Elizabeth Báthory allegedly tortured and killed hundreds of young women and girls.
Elizabeth Báthory was not a vampire in the traditional sense. She was alive while she took her victims, for one, and though she did horrible things to them, she did not suck their blood. But Báthory did allegedly have vampiric tendencies like bathing in their blood in order to maintain her youth.
Indeed, the so-called “Blood Countess” seemed to have an obsession with violence. Between 1590 and 1610, she allegedly tortured hundreds of young women and girls from her lair in Čachtice Castle (in present-day Slovakia). Legend states that she started with servant girls, then targeted the daughters of the gentry, and finally resorted to kidnapping local girls.
Her victims were purportedly subjected to terrible torture. Báthory was rumored to burn and freeze them, beat them, and mutilate them with scissors. She allegedly covered them with honey and let bugs feast on their flesh, sewed their lips shut, and stuck needles under their fingernails.
Čachtice Castle, where Elizabeth Báthory allegedly tortured her victims.
György Thurzó, an official who investigated the claims against Báthory, interviewed 300 witnesses who told him horrifying stories. Some claimed that she was a vampire, while others said she’d had sex with the Devil.
Thurzó eventually charged Báthory with the deaths of 80 girls — but some believe that she had as many as 650 victims.
For these crimes, Báthory was put under house arrest until her death in 1614. However, not everyone believes the incredible claims against her. It’s true that King Matthias II, who first sent Thurzó to investigate, owed Báthory a great debt. It could be that the charges against her were less of a vampire hunt and more of a witch hunt — and that the king merely wanted to remove Báthory from power to avoid paying the significant sums of money he owed.
The Graves Of “Vampires” In Poland
This skeleton was found with a sickle across her throat, a sure sign that her contemporaries believed that she was a vampire.
Though stories of real vampires like Arnold Paole and Peter Plogojowitz were well documented by officials who witnessed their exhumations, many accused vampires were dealt with by villagers without the authorities looking over their shoulders. To understand the breadth of this, you only have to look at recent archaeological discoveries of “vampires” in Poland.
While excavating a site near Pień, for example, archaeologists uncovered a shocking sight: a female skeleton with a sickle laid across her throat and a padlock on her toe. As experts explained, this was a preventive measure to keep the “vampire” from rising from the dead.
“The sickle was not laid flat but placed on the neck in such a way that if the deceased had tried to get up most likely the head would have been cut off or injured,” Nicolaus Copernicus University Professor Dariusz Poliński explained to the Washington Post of the hair-raising find.
A headless skeleton in Luzino, Poland, which was apparently decapitated to keep a “vampire” from rising from the dead.
The more they looked, the more “vampire” graves the archaeologists found near Pień. Most recently, they uncovered the grave of a child with a padlock on its ankle. The child had been buried face-down, which was likely another preventive measure to keep the vampire from rising from the dead.
A similar discovery was also made in Luzino, Poland, where archaeologists found a graveyard full of vampires. Many had been dug up and reburied, and some were decapitated. Many of the dead had coins in their mouths, and others had bricks laid near their arms and legs.
In Polish lore, vampires are like zombies — corpses that can rise from the dead. Thus, measures like laying a sickle across a grave or putting bricks on a skeleton were meant to keep them buried securely in the ground.
The Lives Of Real Vampires In Our Modern World
Maven Lore identifies as a vampire and is king of the New Orleans’ vampire court.
While it’s not all that shocking that the past is full of stories of vampires, it may surprise some that at least 5,000 people identify as vampires in the United States (at least as of 2015).
These people are not undead or particularly violent, but they do have vampiristic tendencies. According to TODAY, some have blood fetishes and participate in “various blood-related activities.” Others merely act like vampires, avoiding sun exposure and drinking donated human blood.
That said, not all self-proclaimed vampires drink blood. Those who do are known within the vampire community as blood vampires or “sanguinarians.” But there are also “psychic” and “energy” vampires who feed not on blood but on the life energy of others (known as prana or qi).
A real vampire identified as “Henry” in an interview with National Geographic.
“We’re people you pass on the street and likely socialize with on a daily basis,” Merticus, the founding member of Atlanta’s Vampire Alliance, told The Guardian. “We often keep this aspect of our life secret for fear we’ll be misunderstood and to safeguard against reprisals from what society deems taboo.”
Merticus, an antique dealer by day, added that he prefers to keep his vampire identity private. “I’m more concerned about family life, the economy, finding a steady donor, and hoping the media doesn’t attribute the latest murder to non-existent ‘vampire cults’ than I am worried about seeking social justice and acceptance for my identity,” he explained.
As such, there’s actually an incredible range of real vampires throughout history — and even up to today. Though vampires like Dracula are, of course, fictional, there are Serbian peasants, bloodthirsty rulers, violent serial killers, and others who might fit our definition of a “real vampire.”
And since there are thousands of self-identifying vampires in the United States today, you might even know one — without knowing it.