SHOCKING!!!! VAMPIRES DID EXIST

Popular literature would have it that the vampire's preferred habitat is Transylvania (or, if you're under 15, the slightly less glamorous Forks, Washington).

But modern day vampire hunters might better focus their attention on a little-known area of northwestern Poland, where earlier this month a suspected vampire grave was exhumed.tery

Slawomir Gorka, who led the dig at a marketplace in the small West Pomeranian town of Kamien Pomorski, told local website kamienskie.info that several unusual aspects of the burial "indicate that it is a vampire burial".

Teeth had been removed, a fragment of rock was inserted in the mouth, and a leg had been staked (presumably to prevent the body rising from the grave).

And this isn't the first time an interment in Poland has been deemed vampiric. Last July, archaeologists uncovered four decapitated skeletons, their heads placed between their legs, at a construction site in Gliwice, southern Poland. Both the Gliwice and Kamien Pomorski graves are estimated to date back to the 16th century.

The burials may sound gruesome, but they are befitting of early medieval Polish folklore's particularly grisly interpretation of the vampire myth.

The stone in the mouth might be to make a supernatural barrier between the worlds of the dead and the living.

"Specific to Polish vampires is that they are known for eating their own flesh and burial garments when they rise from the dead," says Titus Hjelm, who convenes a course on vampires for the School of Slavonic and Eastern European Studies at University College London. He adds that this may explain the stone placed in the mouth of the skeleton.

Fear of vampires was strong among Eastern Europeans in the medieval period.

Professor Martyn Rady, a colleague of Hjelm's, posits the folk tales spread from Serbia to surrounding countries following a report sent by Austrian military authorities to their superiors in Vienna. It told of a mercenary soldier who had been turned into a vampire and infected his victims, who when exhumed from their own graves were found to have fresh blood in their cavities. The report was intercepted before reaching the Austrian capital and published in newspapers.

The Polish had particular reason to fear vampires rising from their graves, Hjelm explains.

"According to some sources, Poles thought that vampires were born, rather than 'made'," he says. "They were normal people who could live normal lives, not aristocrats living in distant castles. The problems only started when these people died. They could come back to live with their families and even impregnate their wives.