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You're listening to an Ono Media Podcast. Hi everybody and welcome back to the Into the Dark Podcast. I am so happy that you are here listening. I'm gonna just skip over my spiel about
leaving this video a thumbs up, dropping a comment, maybe rating the podcast, okay, and just get right into it. It's really early right now for me. It's 7am as I'm recording this. So good morning. If it's morning time when you're listening to this, I hope we're all going to have an amazing day. Let's get into my 10 seconds before getting into the meat of the episode. So
So my 10 seconds is just going to be a quick little update. We have our Salt Lake City live show coming up this week. So we will be in Utah for that. And then I'm also next week going to be in Idaho. So I have just a couple busy weeks coming up, but I'm really excited. But I'm also just a little bit stressed because
So I will keep you guys updated on how all of that is going. And we literally just got back from out of town yesterday as well. So we've kind of just been everywhere. It was Garrett's birthday, but it's been really good. And I know that once July comes around, things will start to settle down. But yeah, I'm excited. I'm excited for this upcoming month. And I hope that we all have a great month. Let's get into the episode.
Okay, if you know me, you know I love vampires. And if you didn't know, now you do. And some days it really does feel like vampires have kind of taken over pop culture a little bit. You turn on the TV to catch the latest episodes of What We Do in the Shadows or hop on to Netflix to binge Midnight Mass. You hit a bookstore and you see a table full of Twilight books or Anne Rice books. You have Dracula, Buffy, Edward Cullen.
Vampires are a huge part of the media, but they're not real, right? I mean, I remember when I first read Twilight, I was devastated that I was going to have to marry a human. And then I felt the exact same thing when I watched Vampire Diaries for the first time. But the funny thing is almost every single country on Earth has some kind of mythology about vampires.
And all of those stories, they had to come from somewhere. Unless millions or billions of people just happened to come up with the same legends, there may be a grain of truth to these tales. In fact, if the historical record is to be believed, back in the 1700s,
people in a small Serbian community discovered that one of their own was a real life vampire. And this is kind of where the legend begins.
So it all began when a mysterious outbreak swept through a community called Meduena. Cows and other livestock were getting sick from a mysterious illness that none of the farmers knew how to cure. They could only watch helplessly as their animals grew weak and then died. And then, frighteningly, the disease seemed to spread over to people.
Four separate villagers also got sick and then passed away, and the illness acted quickly. Only a couple of days would pass from the time they had their first symptoms until they died. And each person said the same thing before they took their last breath. They said a local soldier named Arnold Powell had made them sick.
Apparently, according to everyone who died, he had infected them on purpose. What is it about the 1700s and blame? Like really? 1700s was just a whole bunch of people being like,
You are the reason for this. Okay, well, the record keeping from the time, obviously 1700s, is very vague. And I don't have a lot of details on how this person was spreading the illness on purpose to people. But each sick person said that Arnold had tortured them in some capacity. Now, it's not clear to me if he actually bit them, but maybe he did.
Either way, everyone agreed that Arnold was to blame for the spread of this disease in the town. This was especially strange for one big reason. Not just that it would be weird for their neighbor to attack and kill the people he'd once considered his friends, but also because Arnold had been dead for almost a full month. So all of his assaults had happened after his funeral.
And if these accounts were to be believed, then Arnold had somehow risen from the dead to hurt and kill and infect all of these people.
Now, these allegations may not have been that surprising to anyone who knew Arnold in real life. Apparently, before his death, he told his neighbors that he'd actually been stalked by a vampire for years or maybe even decades. He was a soldier and during his service, he apparently caught the attention of an undead creature.
And it didn't matter where he was stationed or how far he traveled. This creature always tracked him down and found a way to make it known that Arnold was in danger. Now, before I go on, I do want to pause and explain.
In 1731, when these attacks happened, people understood vampires very differently than we do now. So it's not the vampires that we are used to. They weren't these sexy aristocrats who seduced young women to become creatures of the night.
And they couldn't be killed by a ray of sunlight, and they didn't only drink blood. I would say back then, vampires, or as we know them now, were more like zombies. Just kind of mindless creatures who came back after their death to feed on anyone unfortunate enough to cross their path.
They would sleep all day, then they would rise from their graves at night, but the sunlight didn't hurt them. It just, that was when they came out. And sometimes they would drink their victim's blood, but they also ate food like normal people and occasionally devoured living people's flesh.
So basically, vampires were dangerous because of how brutally violent and unpredictable they were. And at this time, according to legend, there were two ways to turn someone into a vampire. The first was by giving them an improper funeral. Basically, if someone was buried six feet deep in a graveyard near a Christian church, then they were good. But if you skipped one of those steps, say because the ground was frozen during the winter and you couldn't dig the grave low enough,
or if someone was murdered and never properly buried, well, their corpse might wander the earth seeking vengeance on those who were still living. And that led to the second way that a person could become a vampire.
If a vampire attacked or bit someone, they always died and then they rose again as an undead monster after their funeral. So a little bit more how we're used to. And this could happen even if they were buried the right way. The idea was that if a vampire ever attacked you, there was no way to save your life or your soul. That was it. So if Arnold thought...
he had a vampire stalking him. He needed to go to extreme lengths to keep himself safe. He actually relied on some folk wisdom that he'd come across, sort of a life hack to keep vampires away. Somehow he figured out who the vampire had been before they died. And then he found the grave where they were supposed to be buried and he ate some of the dirt from the grave. And then he got his hands on the vampire's blood and
Again, record keeping not so great at the time. It's not clear to me how he found this dead person's blood, but he then smeared it all over his body like it was lotion. And apparently rubbing yourself with a vampire's blood and eating the dirt from their grave was supposed to keep them away from you. Now, sadly, he didn't live long enough to see if this tactic actually worked. Just a short while later, Arnold fell off a wagon and died from his injuries.
And while of course it was tragic for Arnold to lose his life in an accident that should have been preventable, there was a silver lining to all of this. If Arnold was going to die, better for it to be this way rather than let a vampire kill him. At least if he died from a fall, he wouldn't come back as a blood-sucking monster.
That is, in theory. Because based on the testimony from his neighbors, who were all getting sick and dying after his undead body attacked them, it sounded like all the steps Arnold took were for nothing. Somehow, he had still turned into the village vamp- or as the people in town called him, a vampiree. That's the Serbian word for back from the dead, and it's actually where the word vampire comes from.
Now, nobody was sure if Arnold had really been transformed into a flesh-eating fiend. It was hard to make the story of him dying in a fall fit with the local lore about how vampires come about. Unless somehow that vampire that was stalking him had attacked him without him noticing. Or maybe he knew the vampire had gotten to him but kept the news to himself.
The people in the village decided to investigate for themselves and take a look at Arnold's corpse. See if his dead body had any signs of vampirism. Okay, you guys, let me guess. Your medicine cabinet is crammed with stuff that doesn't work. You still aren't sleeping. You still hurt and you're still stressed out.
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By this point, Arnold had been dead for 40 days, so everyone expected him to be pretty badly decomposed when they dug him up.
But when the people dug up his coffin and cracked it open, he looked as fresh as the day he died. There were no signs of decomposition whatsoever. And on top of that, his fingernails and his hair had grown since his funeral. And perhaps the most disturbing part of all was that there was blood leaking out of Arnold's mouth, and it was fresh.
In the past month, all of Arnold's blood should have congealed, but this was still a freely flowing fluid, like he'd maybe bit someone and drink from their necks the very night before. Now, apparently Arnold was a sloppy eater because he didn't just have blood leaking out of his mouth. It was also in his nose, his eyes, and his ears, and some had even dribbled down onto his shirt.
So this was all it took for the people of the village to conclude that Arnold really was a vampire. So they found a more permanent way to kill him.
First, obviously, they drove a wooden stake through his chest, and as soon as it pierced his heart, Arnold moaned out loud like he was still alive after being in the grave for 40 days. But there was no way an ordinary human being could have survived that long in a coffin. And after they stabbed him, according to legend, even more blood oozed out around the stake.
The villagers burned his body next and then buried the ashes in a Christian graveyard. And for extra safety, they did the same thing to the four people who said that Arnold had attacked them before they died. The reason being, they must have been turned into vampires too, so the locals couldn't be safe.
But sadly, even this wasn't the end of the first ever vampire attacks. More and more people kept getting sick and it didn't matter how many corpses the locals staked and burned, the strange vampire attacks kept happening.
Nobody could figure out how. The villagers felt like they were doing everything right. Every time someone died, they made sure to give them a proper burial in the graveyard, and they regularly dug up older bodies and executed them if they saw any evidence of one of them being a vampire. They'd even changed things up. Instead of reburying the ashes in the cemetery, they tried tossing some in the river so the waters could just carry this vampire infection far away.
But the attacks were still happening, and the locals could only come up with one theory to explain all of this. They knew that before they had taken care of Arnold, he'd attacked people and cows.
This was based on the fact that so many cattle also got sick and died around the time that his four victims grew ill. And the villagers thought, what if some of the cows he bit were carrying some kind of infection? And if they slaughtered those cows and the locals had been eating the beef, they might also be transformed into blood-sucking vampires. This was even if they were never bit by a vampire and even if they got a proper burial. And
And if this was the case, there was no possible way to trace which beef had been tainted or who'd been exposed. There was no way to stop the vampire outbreak. So over the next five years, 17 people in the village died after apparent vampire attacks.
One was the stepdaughter of a local village official, a 20-year-old newlywed named Stanoika. She was young and healthy, the sort of person who should have had a long, happy life ahead of her. But one night she went to bed, and at the time she seemed as hardy and fit as ever, but at midnight she began screaming in her sleep.
Her family ran into her room to ask what was wrong and Stanyoika said that a man had just snuck inside and attacked her. She recognized him and she told her relatives his name. But the man she identified had been dead and buried for about two months by this point.
It didn't matter how much her family tried to reassure her or what kinds of treatments the village doctor offered. From that moment onward, Stanyoika's health grew worse and worse. And on top of that, she was obviously very frightened and unsettled every time the sun set, like she knew there was something waiting for her in the night.
And finally, just three days after this attack, she passed away. And I mean, it is kind of crazy that 17 people die in this village and all 17 said that people who were already dead were coming back in the night to attack them. I mean, I'm not one to believe, but that's a little strange.
So by now, the situation was serious enough that the people of the village wanted to bring in some more experienced something. So they reached out to their military and the armed forces had the resources to investigate. And there were plenty of doctors who traveled with the troops. Plus this wasn't just an ordinary village. It was also a popular outpost. Most of the men who lived there were soldiers. So it was only natural for them to ask higher ranking officers for advice.
And sure enough, in December of 1731, a physician named Dr. Glasser received orders to head to this village and investigate the alleged vampire outbreak. Now, by the time he got there, he had learned that 13 people had died of the strange disease in the past six weeks alone. So there was definitely something going on and it's safe to say the village was basically on the verge of a panic.
They told Dr. Glasser that if he didn't fix their vampire problem, they were all going to abandon the village and resettle somewhere else. So the physician got to work, but he really didn't have much evidence to work with. There wasn't anyone actively dying of a vampire attack while he was there.
and everyone who'd been targeted by a vampire had already died before his arrival. And there weren't any recent or new incidents during his stay, everyone seemed pretty fine. So Dr. Glasser just took statements from the villagers about how the deaths had played out before he got there, and he kept track of which symptoms everyone described and tried to see if there were any commonalities between the victims.
And there kind of weren't. The deceased were all different ages, included children, teenagers, young adults, middle-aged people. There was a mix of men and women. And in one case, Dr. Glasser heard about a young mother who'd predicted her own death. According to the villagers, before she died, she warned her neighbors that she was going to come back as a monster, almost like she wanted to give them a head start on the investigation. Except...
After Dr. Glasser comes into this village and he gathers all of his information, he reaches a different conclusion than the village had. He said that all 13 of these people had not died of vampire attacks, but rather of a fever. Now, the village was like,
Absolutely not, Dr. Glasser. There is no way. They all knew what it looked like to die of a fever, and they claimed this was not what was going on. And it didn't matter what Dr. Glasser said. He could not convince anyone that the deaths were all of natural causes. So finally, he agreed to perform autopsies on the alleged vampires. He figured they'd dig up the bodies, he'd find some obvious symptoms of a disease, he could show it to the villagers, and this would finally persuade them.
So the locals dug up 10 different corpses and the doctor autopsied them one by one. And some looked like typical bodies. They were badly decomposed after spending weeks or months in the ground. Dr. Glasser was able to do his post-mortem exam, identify a cause of death, and then give the corpse back to be reburied. However, seven of the bodies he dug up were pristine.
They had all died in the same six-week window as the other three, but while those other remains had rotted and broken down, these seven people looked like they'd only been dead for a few hours. They could have been asleep, except for there was blood dribbling out of each corpse's mouth, just like what had happened with Arnold.
These seven autopsies were enough for Dr. Glasser to re-evaluate all of his theories about what had killed the villagers. He did not think that they'd all died of a fever anymore, and he becomes convinced there really were vampires. And this was a problem, because if these supposedly dead people weren't really dead,
Glasser and the villagers now needed to kill them for real. It was the only way to stop them from climbing out of their graves and attacking more people. But Dr. Glasser was like, "Hey, we can't just stab these people through the heart." So he writes back to his military commander and says, "Hey, can I re-kill these people because they're vampires?"
And when Glasser's commanding officer got this letter, he was stunned. He thought that Glasser was a logical, reasonable man and that he didn't get swept up in superstition. So if he was now saying that he needed authorization to kill seven vampires, it sounded like something strange was happening over in this village. Okay, most beauty brands don't understand fine color treated hair, but Pro
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And he ends up coming back with the same conclusion. There was definitely some type of vampire mystical creature or creatures attacking this village. And when this physician wrote back with the evidence, he did not wait for the military to give him permission to go ahead and re-kill all of these vampires. They just did it.
Now, along the way of all of this happening, the second physician's report became published. So it goes on, it becomes a bit of a bestseller and everyone learns what's happening in this village.
The title, when translated into English, was Seen and Discovered. It's actually one of the earliest and best records of a vampire outbreak in the entire real world. The first printed report of a vampire ever was from just seven years before this. It
when another Serbian village actually went through almost the same exact thing. Nine people died of what they thought was a vampire outbreak.
So a decade after this book is published, the Vatican actually had a leading scholar write a report where he said it was unchristian to believe in vampires now that like this vampire lore had kind of spread. Apparently he hoped he could stop people from worrying about the undead if he could convince churchgoers that their fears were sinful. But of course here we are in 2024 still talking about vampires.
Clearly, all of those attempts to stop people from being afraid just didn't really work out. In fact, we know for a fact that Bram Stoker actually read this book before he wrote his novel Dracula. His book moved vampire legends from the realm of urban legend into that of fiction.
But it may be fair to say that Dracula and all of the other vampire narratives that came afterward were all inspired by a true story. Now, of course, all of these accounts are very old and the early 19th century was a time when a lot of modern ideas about the scientific method and
data gathering hadn't really caught on in the mainstream. So it can be tempting to dismiss all of these stories, to just assume there's a logical explanation that doesn't have anything to do with vampires. Some people think that the people of this village died of a disease that wasn't well understood yet. And as for the blood coming out of the body's mouths and the fact that they would gasp when they were staked through the heart, it could have something to do with the way they were buried
At the time, if a newly deceased person was suspected of being a vampire, it was common for them to bury them face down. So as their body decomposed, maybe their fluids would naturally leak out. And the gasps might've just been the sound of air escaping the chest cavity. And I do wanna emphasize, I know that this village was a small rural community, but it definitely wasn't backwater at the time. Like I said before, a lot of soldiers were stationed there.
These were trained military men who'd seen battle. They knew what death looked like, and they weren't going to panic over just an ordinary fever. The fact that they all believed that they were under a supernatural attack makes it sound like maybe something strange was going on, something that even experienced soldiers and doctors could not explain.
Now, this isn't enough to prove definitively that vampires actually exist. And even if they are real, they probably don't look like Dracula or Edward Cullen or Stefan Salvatore. None of the real life reports featured dashing young millionaires living in mansions. Instead, they slept in graves in small remote villages.
And whether Arnold was an actual vampire or just a plague victim or something else entirely, his story shows that the world can be a scarier and more mysterious place than a lot of us ever imagined. As if that isn't clear enough from the countless stories of murder, strange disappearances, and unsolved mysteries that we know are true,
So tonight, after you finish this episode, it might be worth adding some extra garlic to your dinner. Or if you're feeling extra nervous, it may be worth choking down an extra spoonful of grave dirt because you never know what's lurking out there in the dark. All right, you guys, that was my episode on vampires and I will see you next time with another one. Goodbye.
