← Back to the front page

40 Fang-tastic Facts about the History of Vampires

Tim Flight October 24, 2019 26 min

Wiertz Museum - The Premature Burial — The Premature Burial by Antoine Wiertz, 1854. Wikimedia Commons

23. Vampires in Slavic folklore are really gross

The grisly late 14th-century tomb of French doctor Guillaume de Harcigny shows him as a decomposing corpse. Atlas Obscura

If you met a vampire from Slavic folklore, you’d have no doubt you were talking to a walking corpse. A Strigoi or vampyr looked about as different from Robert Pattinson in Twilight as you can imagine. Slavic vampires were simply corpses that couldn’t decompose properly and had no time to dress well or comb their hair. Accounts of vampires being exhumed always echo the description of a corpse in early decomposition we saw earlier. Bloated, their mouths bloodied, skin taut, with long fingernails and savage teeth, it’s no wonder people feared these vampires.

Written by

Tim Flight

I am a freelance historical and literary writer based in West Yorkshire, UK. I read for a funded PhD in English at the University of Oxford (Magdalen College) and graduated in 2016. I am a former lecturer in Medieval English Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London. My publications include peer-reviewed articles in academic publications, and pieces in mainstream magazines such as History Today and Fortean Times. For more information, please see www.drflight.co.uk