Peter Plogojowitz

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Peter Plogojovitz (Serbian: Petar Blagojević/Петар Благојевић) (d.1725) was a Serbian peasant who was believed to have become a vampire after his death and to have killed nine of his fellow villagers. He lived in the early eighteenth century, in a village named Kisilova, today - Kisiljevo, in what was then called "lower Hungary" (NiederUngarn), but is now part of Serbia. He died in 1725, and his death was followed by a spate of other sudden deaths (after very short maladies), giving rise to the rumor he was a vampire. Before dying, the victims of the epidemic reportedly claimed to have been throttled by Plogojowitz at night. His body was disinterred, examined, found to be in "vampiric" condition, and subsequently staked through the heart and burned. An official of the Austrian imperial administration reluctantly permitted the procedure, because the villagers were "beside themselves with fear" and believed that the whole community could be exterminated by the vampire - which they claimed had already happened "in Turkish times" (i.e. when the village was still in the Ottoman-controlled part of Serbia).

The Austrian official's report on that event was among the first documented testimonies about vampire beliefs in Eastern Europe, and the document was widely translated West and North, contributing to the vampire craze of the eighteenth century in Germany, France and England.

The event was very similar to the later Arnold Paole case of 1726-1732, as a representative of European authorities personally witnessed and attested a "vampiric" corpse, i.e. an undecomposed body with "new skin and nails" (while the old ones have peeled away), which bled and otherwise reacted to being staked. These phenomena or appearances are now known to accompany the natural process of the decomposition of the body (see Finding "vampires" in graves for more details).

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De masticatione mortuorum in tumulis (aka De la mastication des morts dans leurs tombeaux) Michaël Ranft, Leipzig, 1728
The Vampire in Europe 1929, Montague Summers, Kessinger Publishing, 2003, ISBN 0-7661-3576-4