Night-time legends, historical accusations and fear of the returning dead.
On 13 March 1970 television coverage and newspaper disputes brought a crowd to the cemetery. Documents establish a public scare, while the vampire remained the subject of incompatible claim…
In March 1892 Exeter residents opened family graves in an attempt to stop consumption. What the ritual tells us, and why it does not establish the existence of vampires.
Military specialists opened graves after a series of deaths, while villagers linked the crisis to a neighbour burned years earlier.
Villagers connected a rapid series of deaths to a buried neighbour and insisted on exhumation.
A botanist witnessed an exhumation and disputed villagers’ attribution of night-time disorder to a murdered peasant.
Court records from 1691–1692 preserve the account of a man who called himself a werewolf. He described a struggle for crops rather than attacks on people.
A dead neighbour supposedly wandered for sixteen years; villagers ended the terror by opening his grave and cutting off the corpse’s head.
A pamphlet linked murder accusations with a diabolical belt and presented the execution as a public warning.
Attacks on children prompted a werewolf hunt and then prosecution of a hermit living near the forest.
In a distinct story by William of Newburgh, a dead chaplain disturbs his former patroness. Four men wait beside the grave, but the decisive encounter falls to the monk who remains alone in …
