Reanimation of the dead, who subsequently feed upon the living, wasn't an especially uncommon belief prior to the rise of germ theory.
We now imagine vampires as blood-drinking, cloaked Counts—or possibly sparkly, sexy teenagers—but throughout history everyone from the Ancient Greeks, to the Eastern Europeans, to 19th-century Americans saw them as disease victims (and sometimes simply dead miscreants) who could prey on the living from the Great Beyond.
The popularized concept of keeping the dead thoroughly dead by driving a wooden stake through the heart was by no means the only technique employed: decapitation was thought, for example, to flummox the dead, as they would first have to locate their heads before walking amongst the living. And last year in Bulgaria, archaeologists found skeletons with iron rods driven through their chests.
Eventually, similar fears migrated to the New World. During tuberculosis epidemics, 19th-century New Englanders began to notice that the relatives of TB victims began to sicken and waste away after their loved one’s death.
An explanation that widely circulated was that the dead were rising from their graves and sucking the life-blood of their former close friends and relatives; beliefs that persisted into the early 1900s.
In 1846, a man named Horace Ray died of tuberculosis in Griswold, Connecticut. Within the next six years, two of his grown sons died of the same disease. When yet another son fell ill two years later, Ray’s family and friends could think of only one explanation: The dead sons were somehow feeding on and sickening the living one—from the afterlife. In an effort to keep the remaining son from getting even worse, they exhumed the dead sons’ bodies and burned them.
This and other means of "restraint" of the dead were relatively widespread throughout western societies until the dawn of the twentieth century, at which time the concept of transmission afforded a less supernatural explanation for observed events. The veneer of sophisticated knowledge that today we take for granted in most parts of the world is just that; a recent, and therefore thin, veneer.
