The only vampires ever confirmed by government paperwork. Between 1725 and 1732, Habsburg officials and army surgeons filed sworn reports describing undecayed corpses that bled, and Europe's presses did the rest.
Documented
The paperwork is real
July 1725, Kisiljevo: Imperial Provisor Ernst Frombald oversees the exhumation of Petar Blagojevic, dead ten weeks, after nine villagers die swearing he throttled them at night. The body is found fresh, new skin growing, blood at the mouth; it is staked and burned. Frombald's report, printed in the Wienerisches Diarium, carries the first published Western use of the word Vampyri. January 1732, Medvedja: a formal commission under regimental surgeon Johann Fluckinger opens seventeen graves, finds twelve bodies quite complete and undecayed with uncoagulated blood in the chest cavity, and signs the Visum et Repertum in Belgrade. By March it is in the London Journal, by year's end it is a Nuremberg pamphlet.
Assessment: Every document survives: Frombald's report, the Visum et Repertum, the gazette trail from Vienna to London. The observations match ordinary decomposition, bloating, purge fluid, skin slippage, yet the commission recorded them under oath as the Vampyrenstand, the vampiric condition. It is the best-documented supernatural diagnosis in the history of state medicine.
Stories
The borderlands already knew the rules
The reports landed on prepared soil. The frontier villages, hajduks resettled on the Habsburg-Ottoman Military Frontier after the Peace of Passarowitz, carried a complete casework: who rises (murderers, perjurers, the contaminated), what contaminates (a cat over the corpse, a shadow across it, meat from a vampire-killed sheep), and the only remedies (stake, fire, running water for the ashes). Arnold Paole himself claimed to have survived a vampire attack in Kosovo by eating the creature's grave dirt and smearing himself with its blood.
Assessment: Documented as belief, both in the official reports and later in ethnography, Friedrich Krauss's Slavische Volksforschungen (1908) preserves the system's internal logic. That logic is airtight, which is precisely why no official argument could dent it.
Interesting claims
The Enlightenment fought back with pens
The backlash built the genre's second canon. Ranft's De masticatione mortuorum (1725, expanded 1728) blamed imagination rather than bloodsucking. Dom Calmet's Dissertation (1746, expanded 1751) compiled everything and suspended judgment so carefully that posterity misread him as a believer. Van Swieten's report moved Maria Theresa to decree in 1755 that staking and exhumation were superstition and fraud. Voltaire delivered the kill shot in 1764: no vampires were ever seen in London or Paris, he wrote, only stockjobbers and brokers who sucked the people's blood in broad daylight, and they were not dead, merely corrupted.
Assessment: Documented as a publication war with a winner. The decree ended official tolerance, the presses moved on, and the only vampires left standing were in books: Polidori read the Paole case and published The Vampyre in 1819, turning the peasant revenant into an aristocrat. The rest is costume drama.
Sources and further reading
Frombald's Kisiljevo report, Wienerisches Diarium (July 21, 1725), first Western print use of Vampyri
Fluckinger, Visum et Repertum, Belgrade (January 26, 1732), the Medvedja commission of January 7
London Journal (March 11, 1732) and Grub-Street Journal (March 16, 1732), the word enters English
Ranft, De masticatione mortuorum in tumulis (1725; expanded 1728; Tractat, 1734)
Calmet, Dissertations sur les apparitions (1746; expanded Traite, 1751)
Van Swieten's report and Maria Theresa's decree on Magia Posthuma (1755); Abhandlung des Daseyns der Gespenster (Augsburg, 1768)
Hamberger, Mortuus non mordet (1992), the documents in facsimile
Polidori, The Vampyre (1819), the Paole case becomes literature
Worth asking
The surgeons recorded exactly what they saw, and what they saw was decomposition. So which is the anomaly: the bodies, or the fact that the paperwork outlived the explanation?