People have believed in vampires for thousands of years, and surprisingly, there is quite a body of documented evidence which seems irrefutable. For example, in Yugoslavia in 1732, a group of civil and military officials, together with a Public Prosecutor and a troop of 24 soldiers under the command of a lieutenant of Duke Charles Alexander of Wurttemberg, went to the grave of where an alleged vampire had been buried three years earlier. At the graveside the soldiers and officials were joined by a number of 'various respected persons' who had also arrived to witness a sensational event: the execution of a vampire.
Over the last two weeks, it had been claimed that the man in the grave had murdered one of his brothers, and three of his nieces and nephews. He had subsequently been disturbed while sinking his teeth into the delicate neck of his fifth victim - another niece - whose blood he had sucked on two previous occasions. The bloodthirsty uncle had been seen to flit from the scene of the attacks with incredible agility into the direction of the graveyard, and now the authorities had been called in to put the vampire to rest, hopefully for good.
By the light of the soldier's lanterns, the grave looked disturbed, and the soil above it was inexplicably loose. Several soldiers dug down to the coffin, and were alarmed to see that the lid of the casket was not fastened down. They clambered out of the hole and two volunteers and a priest carefully descended into the open grave, armed with crucifixes, cloves of garlic, a copy of the Bible - and an iron bar with a sharpened end.
The priest lifted the coffin lid and passed it up to two other soldiers. Everyone present trembled to see that the 'corpse' in the coffin looked in the best of health, but had a somewhat ashen complexion. One of the soldiers then acted on a silent signal from the priest and plunged the iron bar through the vampire's chest, piercing its heart. A sickly white thick fluid and a great quantity of blood spurted out from the chest and mouth of the man in the coffin, and he screamed in agony. A hacksaw was handed to the other soldier in the grave pit, and he set about sawing off the vampire's head. As he sawed through the neck, the man in the coffin tried to talk, but seemed to choke on his blood. The severed head was later buried in quicklime, and the headless body was left in the coffin and covered with soil again. After the grisly ritual there were no further vampire attacks in the village. This incident is just one of hundreds that have been documented in Europe.
There have also been sporadic reports of modern-day vampires on the loose in Liverpool, England. In February 1983, a young single mum living in a bedsit in Lodge Lane with her eight-month-old baby had the feeling that she was being watched. She was not the superstitious or paranoid type, but from the day she moved into the bedsit, she had the horrible sensation of being observed by someone or something next door, especially at night. In the end, the edgy electric atmosphere in the bedsit became so intense that the woman went to Wavertree Road police station and told a bemused constable about the interminable feeling about being watched in the spooky flat. The policeman said there was nothing he could do, but the girl began to sob, and she hysterically begged him to send an officer to the flat adjacent to her bedsit, for she felt as if the place was 'radiating evilness'. To calm her down the police officer promised he'd send someone around to look into the matter.
That night at 10 p.m., the young woman was watching News At Ten to take her mind off the eerie predicament, when she was startled to hear loud thumps coming from the flat next door. She looked out the window and saw a police car down below in the street. Then she realised that the police had responded to her plea, and were inspecting the next-door flat. They had been the source of the banging noises. She put her ear to the wall and was relieved to hear the strains of a policeman's radio blurting out.
The police later revealed to her what they had found in the flat next door, and the revelation resulted in the girl packing her bags. After they had broken into the flat, the two policemen saw that the previous occupier had painted all of the walls black. These walls were dotted with mysterious pentagrams and other occult symbols. In the middle of the floor there was a coffin, that looked over a hundred years old. It had probably been stolen from a tomb in a local graveyard, but it was empty and there were no traces of the corpse it had contained. The nameplate was too rusted to be identifiable. Next to the coffin was a mysterious book entitled The Book of Shadows and next to this book was an empty milk bottle - which contained a small amount of human clotted blood.
No one in the street could remember who the occupier of that flat was, and he or she never returned, but even the hard-boiled streetwise policemen said they experienced an icy chill in the flat. The young mum left that night and went to stay with her auntie on the Wirral.
According to ongoing reports, there is a vampire-like being still at large in the Lodge Lane area of Liverpool. In June 1997, a man whose bedsit is directly under the black-walled flat where the coffin was found, awoke at 2 am one morning to see a bloodshot eye looking down at him from a hole in the ceiling. The man shouted out and the eye moved away from the hole. At first light, the man went upstairs to the flat and hammered on the door to have words with the peeping tom, but the flat was empty. An elderly neighbour told the man that for as long as she could remember, the unnocupied flat had had a spooky atmosphere and no one had lived in it for fifteen years. The last person to live in the flat had been a strange, reclusive sullen-skinned man of 'foreign appearance', who had died in the flat in March 1982 of 'natural causes'.
A couple of days later, the sinister voyeur was spotted spying on the man in the bedsit again - this time through his kitchen ceiling. The man's nerves were naturally shattered by the menacing red eye, and he left that same day.
That same week, children playing in nearby Toxteth Park Cemetery were chased by a tall eerie man in a long black overcoat. The figure was completely bald, and the children who fled from his clutches said he had dark rings around his eyes, which were bloodshot. Days later, the same bizarre-looking figure was seen chasing a stray dog - in the very road off Lodge Lane where the black room is.
In early May 2001, there was another eerie incident reported in the Lodge Lane area which made people wonder whether the vampire or another ghoul was at large. A student was awakened at 3.30 a.m. by someone frantically pressing the buzzer of her door intercom. The door intercom unit is equipped with a small TV camera, and when the student switched on her door security monitor she jumped with fright. Gazing into the camera on her doorstep was someone - or something - with a ghastly, grotesque face. The student was so terrified, she called the police, but when they turned up, there was no sign of the unearthly caller. The student's seemingly incredible story was subsequently vindicated by the 24 hour security TV cameras, which actually videotaped the weird-looking prowler.. The student later left the apartment to stay with a friend. Of course, a hoax can never be ruled out, but if it wasn't a prank, who was the sinister late-night caller?