Just to note strangers, this story will probably be a little too scary for our youngest listeners.

So, discretion is advised.

I'm Laura Norton, and this is one strange thing, the show where we search the nation's news archives,

for stories that can't quite be explained.

Strangers, would it even be October if we didn't bring you a proper Halloween-themed topic?

No, it would not.

And what is more classically spooky than a vampire?

We've covered the subject before, of course.

Episode 32 told the tale of the Mineral Point Wisconsin vampire,

and in episode 71, we discussed the New England

vampire panic. And one thing we've gotten into a bit before is the fear around the rising of the

undead. That is, after all, one of the main problems with vampires. They have a bad habit of unburying themselves and then wreaking

all sorts of jugular-related havoc. Humanity's fear of this violence and the metaphorical

relationship between vampirism, mortality, and a variety of other things so complex that we would

need to host an entire seminar to get into them,

they have led to many, many superstitions.

And there are more folkloric bits and pieces regarding vampirism than we can possibly get into here.

There's sunlight and crucifixes and distracting the undead with spilled

grains of rice and avoiding inviting them into your home, the use of garlic, bearing them at

crossroads, the convenient inability to cross-running water, we could go on. But pretty much everyone

knows about staking vampires through the heart

as a means of permanently dispatching them. In fact, the BBC's History Extra reported that this

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