Days when vampires were a real nightmare: 17th and 18th century research says creatures were infesting villages in Eastern Europe

Daily Mail: Vampires were real creatures infesting the peasant villages of Eastern Europe and sucking the blood of innocents. Or scientists once thought they were. The reality of vampires was firmly believed in by the doctors and scientific pioneers of 300 years ago, who crammed their journals with stories of the undead who feasted on the living, according to a new academic analysis.

Dr Groom, Professor of English at Exeter University, said vampires were considered real in the 1600s and early in the 1700s serious scientists in London were producing widely-read papers discussing their behaviour.

‘For many years vampirism was a serious subject of research: on the one hand it was a terrifying medical disorder, on the other a mass delusion fostered by wretched social conditions,’ he said.

Medical authorities in the 1670s wrote Latin treatises about ‘grave eating’ where the undead were dug up to find they had been eating their own shrouds and even feasting on their own limbs and bowels, according to his research...read more>>>...