The Story Of Arnold Paole (Synthesis)
Before we start here is a little background. Arnold Paoles story was very popular back in the 1700s. The reason I find it worth mentioning is because his story influenced a lot of people to write more gothic/horror tales.
Arnold Paole was a soldier in the Austrian army. The story takes place after he had come home from the war in the spring of 1727. He was residing in Meduegna which was a Serbian village. While in his home town he built himself a home and soon married. It is said that he had expressed to his wife that he feared that his life would be taken prematurely. Arnold Paole soon went on a tour with his army to Greece. While in Greece it is said that he told his wife along with others that he had he had met an “undead” or vampire. This part of the story gets a little fuzzy because some say he battled the vampire and the vampire bit his just before he killed it and in other retellings it is said that a vampire had come to haunt him so he went to its grave and burned its corpse because that was a custom at the time. Now after this he resigned from the military and went back to his home town in Meduegna. A little while after he returned home and went back to working on his farm. One day he fell from a great height and fell unconscious. Unfortunately after a few days he died from his injuries. After his burial strange occurrences began happening and since Paole told people about his vampire encounters prior to his death, suspicions begun to circulate about him being connect to the suspicious events. Some of the events were said to be of Paole showing up at people’s house, people seeing him around town, and people were turning up dead with their blood drained out of them. Forty days after Paole was buried Officers were ordered to exhume his body in order to tell if he was the cause of these strange occurrences. When they unburied him they found that his body was still very fresh and there was a small amount of blood resting on his lips. After they saw this they immediately staked his body and after this it is said that he let out a blood curdling scream and fresh blood sprayed out of his body. Also some sources say that they also chopped off his head and burned his corpse, some say garlic was spread around Paole’s and his victims graves, and others say that that they just exhumed the bodies of his victims and staked them as well. After this all was well until either 1731 or 1732 when 11 new corpse showed up around the town with similar circumstances as Paole’s other victims but no real explanations were found. Some people theorized that Paole may have bitten a cow and since people ate it’s meat it cause them to turn as well but no one knows for certain what happened. All that we know is the fact that Arnold Paole was a real person and documentation from the time says that these events actually did take place. The only question is, were the people of Meduegna just paranoid or was this really a case of a vampire?
