Wharram Percy, England
Whitby in Yorkshire is famous for being the landing place of Dracula on his arrival in England. But the Uk isn’t generally famous for its vampire beliefs. However, historical accounts are due so that, as with their counterparts in Eastern Europe, the medieval English believed in the existence of vampires.
A 12th-century Yorkshire cleric named William of Newburgh, describes just such an English revenant. To escape crimes unknown, a man fled to York and there he lived until his death. But once buried, he did not lie quietly. His body began to rise at night, to roam the quiet streets of the town. The terrified townsfolk took to barring their doors but eventually, their fear drove them to exhume the wrongdoer’s corpse.
They were confronted with a body “swollen to an enormous corpulence, with its countenance beyond measure turgid and suffused with blood.” The people of York mutilated the body to ensure that the revenant could not rise again and burnt it for good measure.
Ten individuals buried between the 11th and 13th centuries, recently discovered in the cemetery of the deserted medieval village of Wharram Percy in Yorkshire show evidence of the same treatment. It has been estimated that three women, two men, a teenager and two children under five were crudely decapitated with knives, their bodies dismembered and their skulls smashed and burnt sometime after death to prevent them from rising from their graves. The grisly remains are the first to substantiate the notion that the medieval English believed in vampires.