Ha, a few of my archeologist friends worked on this! I remember one detail regarding the decapitated (17th century IIRC) bodies they found: one would put a sic

Ha, a few of my archeologist friends worked on this! I remember one detail regarding the decapitated (17th century IIRC) bodies they found: one would put a sickle between the head and the rest of the body. Some of the local construction site workers hired to help with digging were quite upset/scared by the view. Also, I think we can thank Austro-Hungarian civil servants and bureaucracy for the amount of documentation we have on the subject. Central Europe was much luckier in that regard than the regions farther east. Tangentially related: the WoD (World of Darkness, esp. Vampire: the Masqureade) scene in Poland was relatively big in 2010s, compared to the rest of Europe IIRC. I used to run one of the biggest bi-weekly LARPs in the region, called Totentanz, with 25 regular bloodsuckers joining the game every Sunday. Krakow, my hometown is an excellent setting for that: the medieval city moved up by one floor, so we have a tonne of old dungeons/cellars to dress up as vampires, plot against each other, and pretend we like smoking clove cigarettes.