Arnold Paole

Arnold Paole was an Austrian soldier died in 1727 in the village of Medvegia in Serbia, while falling from a cart of hay. The history does not retain its name because of this anecdote altogether rather banal but because it would have returned after its death in the form of a Vampire.

Of alive sound, Paole claimed to have killed a vampire at the time of a war between the Austria and the Greece and was persuaded to carry the curse of it. It is told that one month after its death, he would have been seen grinding in the neighborhoods of the village and that he would have drunk the blood of about half of the population.

Paole and all its alleged victims were exhumed and transpierced of a pile. It is also told that when his coffin was opened, its corpse was intact and its covered lips of blood and that it would have pushed a horrible howl when one planted the pile in the heart to him.

This history, as well as a great number of similar cases, started a massive reappearance of the belief in the vampires through Europe. - It is known today that these “waves of vampirism” were due to the current epidemics at that time. - In front of the great number of similar cases, much of investigations and continuations were opened by the authorities.

The survey into the case of Paole and other Serb vampires was carried out by the imperial council of war of Vienna, because Serbia was at the time an Austrian province. It is in its statement, written with Belgrade into 1732 that the word “vampire” is quoted officially for the first time.

The case of Arnold Paole is related to that of Peter Plogojowitz, another vampire which would have appeared two years earlier (in 1725), in the village of Kisolova, very near to Medvegia. These two cases caused a considerable passion in Western Europe.

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