On 1 March 1755, the Empress Maria Theresia (1717-1780), ruler of the vast Austro-Hungarian Empire, issued a decree in which she said: ‘we have observed with displeasure… what recently happened in our margravate of Moravia: …various corpses were exhumed from a cemetery by clergy under pretext that they were afflicted with the so-called “posthumous magic”, and one of them was burned, even though investigation of the case revealed nothing unnatural. Since this often involves superstition and fraud, and we will in no way allow such sinful abuses in our territories, they will henceforth be subject to the most severe penalties.’
For the Empress to concern herself in this way suggests that she was describing more than an isolated incident, and one with serious political and religious implications. As John Blair explains in Killing the Dead (see ‘Further reading’ below), this period saw an epidemic of so-called ‘vampire-killing’ episodes, beginning in the 1710s, reaching peaks in the 1720s and 1740s, and climaxing in the 1750s; an average of 15 recorded instances of corpse ‘killings’ took place in the Austro-Hungarian Empire every decade over this 50-year period.
The response of the Habsburg bureaucracy was to despatch official investigators to the regions where most of these incidents were taking place – especially the militarised frontier zones of Serbia and northern Bosnia. They reported, in highly colourful detail, on what they found: multiple examples of recently dead people being dug up from their graves and ritually ‘killed’, either by having a stake driven through their hearts or by being burned. In each case, the bodies so exhumed were said to have remained uncorrupted, and were reportedly bloated with blood, or with red cheeks, red lips, or smiling expressions; blood found in their mouths was said to be that of their victims and cited as clear evidence of their post-mortem crimes.
