Whether the material of horror films or scary stories told around campfires, vampires are the thing of legend and folklore as well as history and science. The true existence of vampires, those who survive by drinking the blood of their human victims, has been debated and researched for hundreds of years, but the fact remains that the stories continue and are now bolstered by interesting discoveries adding credibility to the possibility that vampires do in fact exist.

Matteo Borrini of the university if Florence and Peer Moore-Jansen of Wichita State University both now claim to have discovered the earliest legitimate remains of someone possibly believed to be a vampire. In both cases, skeletal remains of an individual were found with a brick placed in the mouth of the deceased at burial, a practice undertaken supposedly to prevent the dead from chewing on their own burial shroud. It is normal for blood to be expelled from the mouth of a non-embalmed deceased person, so the phenomenon of blood in the mouth and on the burial shroud of a corpse is easily explained, but to the gravediggers of the 1500’s it was not a chance worth taking.

What these new discoveries mean scientifically is unclear, but what is clear is that the person who buried the deceased believed they may have been vampires. That belief itself is enough to cause speculation and spurred research into the true existence of vampires both in the past as well as in modern day.

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