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Culture

Bulgaria’s Vampire Graveyards

What a World
BEAST INSIDE

NurPhoto.com / Alamy

In a 7,000-year-old town in Bulgaria, over 100 graves have been uncovered, revealing skeletons with stakes through their hearts and mutilated bones.

Nina Strochlic

Updated Oct. 24, 2019 1:17PM ET / Published Oct. 15, 2014 5:45AM ET 

Vampires may be greeted with swoons today, but in medieval Eastern Europe they were dealt a metal spike through the chest.

Last week, Bulgarian archaeologists unearthed an unusual 13th-century grave in an ancient city named Thracian.

The bones are encrusted in dirt, revealing a bowed, partially crushed skull and a round stake emerging from the left side of the skeleton’s chest. The interred is believed to be a middle-aged man, who was incapacitated post-death—cause unknown—by a two-pound iron rod thrust through his heart and the removal of the lower half of his left leg. Both mutilations were meant to stop the man, who villagers believed was a vampire, from returning to haunt the town and prey upon its inhabitants, researchers say.

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