Jon Solo Sebastian 03/20/2026:

“I want to believe.”

I say that quote a lot, but the thing is that I do believe. Whether these beasties I write about exist today or not is a whole other story, but I believe many of them existed at some point in time…. Though I will say that many of them can be mistaken for something else. I may have mentioned this before, but I drive at night for work, and I’ve seen some things on the ground and in the sky that makes me wonder. There are times, though, that I see a deer standing on the side of a dark road, or crossing the road, and if you’re not sure what you’re looking at or seeing in the corner of your eye, your imagination can run wild. Their eyes are an amber-ish yellow glow, and their movements, especially Bucks, look sort of creepy while they sometimes appear to be bipedal from a distance in the dark. So, I know this isn’t about deer in the night, but just making the point that even though I believe, I can also clearly see the reality in certain things, and I fully understand the skepticism.

Vampire Zero?

You may have heard the name Arnold Paole before. If not, you will get a brief idea of who or what he was as we dive into this little vampire story. This story begins with a Serbian soldier who served in the Austrian military, Arnold Paole, who claimed to have been attacked by a vampire while fulfilling a recruitment order for border protection for either Greece or Turkey (various sources name varying locations). Paole, sometimes referred to as “vampire zero,” went on to reportedly track down the vampire that attacked him, slay it, and then take some odd precautions to ensure he would not become a vampire himself. He ate a small portion of dirt from the vampire’s grave, and then smeared some of it’s blood on himself. Reports do not say where he learned about this ritual, but as we’ll learn in a moment, it didn’t help. Townsfolk had said Paole mostly avoided human contact, appeared to be haunted, and was always brooding. After a short time, he died of freak accident where he fell off his cart and broke his neck.

Not long after Paole’s burial, mysterious deaths began ripping through the town, and of course panic ensued; especially after a chilling revelation. “People were getting sick—feverish, pale, delirious—and dying within days. And they all said the same thing before they went: Arnold had come to visit them in the night.

The villagers were convinced he had risen from the grave. And in true 18th-century fashion, the solution was simple: dig him up. What they found freaked everyone out. Paole’s body was “unnaturally preserved.” His skin was still pink, his nails had grown, and there was fresh blood on his mouth.”

Approximately forty days later, they dug up his grave to investigate the body. Typically by this time, the body would have been infested by insects, and the skin would be a grayish color. The heart will have stopped pumping blood for so long that the likelihood of blood being around his mouth, and his skin looking pink and fresh seems rather unlikely. When the villagers and the officers in charge saw this, the only conclusion was vampirism. They jabbed a stake into his chest to which eyewitnesses proclaimed they heard a loud demonic scream as fresh blood shot up into the air. After they staked him, he was beheaded and burned to ashes, and the ashes were then scattered. Depending on the source, from here, they unburied the other people who died mysteriously and did the same thing to those bodies.

Five years went by, and the people of Medveda, Serbia thought the vampire scare was over. Of course, that’s when more strange deaths started picking up. It couldn’t possibly be Paole, since they destroyed his body. What made things even more intense for the villagers is that a town nearby was dealing with the same thing, and vampire reports were rising up all over the region.

A field surgeon named Johannes Fluckinger, and a physician named Glaser investigated the vampire reports at different times. Glaser was a contagion physician and he found no evidence to scientifically explain the deaths. Fluckinger was then called in for documentation and to try to determine the causes of death. I believe he was sent in to quell the vampiric fears, but it seems his detailed investigations only further fueled the hysteria of vampires ravaging the towns.

“The Arnold Paole incident and Flückinger’s official report from January in 1732 he called “About the so-called vampire or bloodsucker, as seen in Medvedja, in Serbia, on the Turkish border on January 7, 1732.”, spread quickly through European intellectual circles, feeding an insatiable curiosity for vampire lore. It was one of the first recorded cases to feature systematic investigation, written documentation, and public execution of suspected vampires — long before Bram Stoker’s Dracula or even the Gothic literature of the 19th century.

The case of Arnold Paole cemented the Balkans as the epicenter of vampire mythology and inspired a wave of vampire-related pamphlets, academic debates, and terrified imaginings across Europe.”

I think most of this can be explained scientifically today, but at the same time, it’s hard to say what really went on back in the 1700’s… unless any vampires of today were there to witness it—ha ha. There is a source that I won’t link to because it is unreliable, in my opinion, but they claim that people started gearing up and hunting for vampires. The source goes on to say that the government and doctors banned/outlawed vampire hunting. If this is the case, I can understand it because fear and the unknown causes people to not think clearly and act out of fear rather than be reasonable, and being able to think clearly. So, perhaps something bad happened to encourage lawmakers to ban the hunting of vampires in order to protect innocent humans.