In the winter of 1731–1732, inhabitants of Medveđa in Serbia explained a succession of deaths as attacks by returning corpses. Officials investigated twice. The first visitor, a quarantine physician named Glaser, examined sick villagers and opened graves. A second commission, led by regimental surgeon Johann Flückinger, recorded dissections and the destruction of bodies judged to be vampires. Their paperwork survives as evidence of an extraordinary investigation, rather than proof that the dead returned to life.
The case is often condensed into the story of Arnold Paole. The documents call him Arnout Paole, with variant spellings in print, and describe his death about five years before the second inquiry. Separating that retrospective testimony from what the investigators themselves examined reveals a more complicated episode: two medical visits, several suspected sources of affliction, frightened households and observations interpreted through contemporary beliefs about blood and decay.
The village and the surviving documents
The locality associated with the case is Medveđa near Trstenik, on the northern side of the West Morava valley, rather than the better-known town of the same name in southern Serbia. Christian Reiter’s 2009 forensic study places it between Kraljevo and Kruševac. His article supplies German transcriptions of Glaser’s December report and the later surgeons’ report, permitting comparison of the original accounts rather than reliance on modern vampire retellings.
The Austrian State Archives catalogue identifies the Medveđa dossier as AT-OeStA/FHKA SUS Kur 01.1, including folios 1131–1143. Its catalogue creation date of 29 February 1732 should not be mistaken for the day of the exhumations. The record describes an archival file containing the administrative trail. This account uses the published transcriptions and catalogue; it does not claim a new examination of the original handwritten sheets.
Glaser’s visit in December 1731
In his report dated 12 December 1731, Glaser described a house-to-house investigation. He initially identified intermittent fevers and pains in the side and chest, rather than a contagious outbreak, and connected the illnesses with fasting and other practices as he understood them. These were his eighteenth-century medical judgments, not laboratory diagnoses. Villagers gave a different explanation: thirteen people had died over six weeks, and vampires would continue killing unless the authorities permitted their destruction.
The report conveys fear through practical details. Two or three households assembled together at night, with some people keeping watch while others slept. The inhabitants threatened to leave rather than await further deaths. Glaser and the accompanying officers could not persuade them to abandon their interpretation. He therefore had ten graves opened, ostensibly to investigate whether their allegations had any basis.
Miliza was central to the suspicions. Glaser described her as about fifty, buried for seven weeks, and formerly thin. Villagers said she had previously eaten sheep believed to have been killed by vampires in Ottoman territory. They treated this as an explanation for her later condition. Glaser reported swelling and fluid at the mouth and nose, and admitted that the contrast with other, decomposed bodies troubled him. The alleged meal and its supernatural consequences remained reported beliefs.
Another woman, Stanno, had died in childbirth. The account said she had once smeared herself with a vampire’s blood as protection and expected to become a vampire herself after death. Her infant had died too. Glaser’s report moves between such local explanations and his own classification of bodies as suspicious or decomposed. He ended by recommending official action to satisfy the inhabitants, rather than offering a definite natural explanation that resolved their fears.
The older Paole story was testimony
Flückinger’s later report begins with statements from village elders and frontier soldiers. They said Paole had broken his neck in a fall from a hay wagon about five years earlier. During his life he allegedly claimed to have been troubled by a vampire near Cossova, and to have tried grave earth and blood as remedies. Within twenty or thirty days of his death, people reportedly complained of his attacks; four deaths were attributed to him.
According to these witnesses, Paole was exhumed roughly forty days after burial. They described blood, an apparently preserved body and changes in skin and nails. They said he groaned when staked, after which his body was burned. The four supposed victims were also destroyed. These events belong to the witnesses’ earlier story. Flückinger and his colleagues were not reporting that they had personally seen Paole rise, attack anyone, or undergo that first exhumation.
The same testimony linked the later deaths to animals supposedly attacked by vampires and then eaten by people. It reported seventeen deaths over three months. That interval differs from Glaser’s six-week tally, so the two numbers should not automatically be treated as counts of exactly the same period. Nor does the testimony establish that meat transmitted an undead condition: it records how the witnesses connected the episodes.
What the surgeons actually recorded
The second report is headed 7 January 1732; officers added an attestation at Belgrade dated 26 January. After hearing witnesses, the investigators went to the burial ground and examined the bodies. The resulting document, known as Visum et Repertum, contains thirteen numbered entries, some describing a mother together with a child. The number of entries should not be confused with either the earlier death tally or a simple count of individual bodies.
Stana, aged about twenty, was described as having died following childbirth. The surgeons reported fluid blood in the chest and apparently fresh internal organs. Yet they also described an enlarged, inflamed uterus with retained material and putrefaction. The account therefore does not say every part of every suspected body was perfectly preserved. Its own anatomical detail complicates that familiar summary.
Miliza was now described as about sixty and buried for more than ninety days. Observers were said to be astonished by her swollen appearance because they remembered her as thin. Other entries include young people and infants described as being in the same supposed vampire condition. In contrast, the lieutenant’s wife and child, the standard-bearer’s wife and child, and a corporal’s servant were recorded as decomposed and were reburied.
One woman, Stanjoicka, was associated with a reported night attack by the dead Milloe. The surgeons noted a dark mark under her right ear and fluid issuing from her nose. Those observations did not identify who or what caused the mark. At the end, the report states that the bodies classified as vampires were decapitated and burned, with their ashes cast into the Morava. The signatures authenticate an account of the inquiry and its actions; they do not independently validate the supernatural interpretation.
Differences that should remain visible
The reports do not supply a perfectly consistent register. Miliza’s age changes from approximately fifty to sixty; estimates of time underground also differ. A later printed version introduces further variation. Johann Christoph Harenberg’s 1733 reproduction, section II, introduces the report as dated 17 January, while its closing text gives 7 January and the officers’ attestation gives 26 January. The illustration above shows the introductory date exactly as printed.
Harenberg’s narrative also says Stanioicka died on the eighth day after the reported attack, whereas its own numbered entry describes a three-day illness. Reiter’s manuscript transcription gives three days in the narrative too. These differences warn against building an exact chronology by silently selecting whichever wording suits a retelling. The two inquiries and their broad sequence are better supported than every reported age or interval.
Explanations and the limits of retrospective diagnosis
Scepticism was already present in 1733. Harenberg’s annotations invoked winter cold and restricted access to air when discussing preserved bodies and liquid blood. He pointed to the diseased uterus as evidence against universal preservation and challenged the justification for destroying the dead. These are the editor’s arguments, printed around the report; they should not be reassigned to Flückinger as his own conclusions.
Reiter’s modern analysis considers ordinary post-mortem changes and proposes anthrax as a possible explanation for the illnesses, drawing on the reported animal connections, symptoms and local environment. This is a retrospective interpretation of incomplete descriptions, not identification of a pathogen in preserved samples from the victims. It is more defensible to retain that distinction than to replace an old supernatural certainty with an equally absolute diagnosis.
Historian Ádám Mézes’s 2021 original archival study approaches the episode through relations between local Orthodox communities and Habsburg medical administration. It emphasises Glaser’s often-overlooked first commission and the way official reports helped turn local explanations into an apparently authoritative account of contagion. That historical reading explains why the administrative setting matters without requiring acceptance of vampirism.
What survives most securely is a documented response to deaths and fear: testimony, grave examinations, competing interpretations and destructive action. The documents preserve neither controlled observations of a revenant nor a demonstrated mechanism for the alleged attacks. Their value lies in the unusually detailed record of how witnesses and investigators interpreted bodies—and in the discrepancies that let readers test later summaries against the sources.
Approximate map area. The pin uses a rounded GeoNames village reference for Medveđa in Trstenik municipality, at 43.63°N, 21.08°E. It represents the locality associated with the inquiry, not a verified historic grave, exhumation spot or private home. No particular modern burial place is identified.
Source trail: Glaser’s report and the surgeons’ report were read in Reiter’s German transcriptions, alongside Harenberg’s complete section II and its fifteen editorial notes; the page-27 scan was inspected. The Austrian catalogue and relevant sections of Mézes’s study were also checked. Original English paraphrases here distinguish primary testimony from later analysis. Related reading: Kisiljevo’s separate 1725 report and Ghosts & Hauntings. Checked 5 November 2026.