It was a foggy day on April 6, back in the year 1725, when angry villagers of the rural hamlet of Kisiljevo, Serbia, opened the grave of their neighbor Petar Blagojević, who died eight days before. His death was followed by a spate of nine other sudden deaths and numerous claims by the victims being throttled by Petar at night. When they cracked the casket open, features associated with vampires, just like they anticipated, were indeed present: the body was undecomposed, the hair and beard were grown, there was a mixture of new skin and nails along with old ones peeled away, and there was blood flowing out of his mouth. The villagers were accompanied by an official of the Austrian administration (the Austrian Empire governed the area in the early 18th century) and a local priest. The entire case was documented and reported to the officials and covered by Die Wiener Zeitung, a Viennese newspaper, on July 21st. At the time, the vampirism was fully embedded into Serbian folklore with nume...