Bulgaria's Vampire Graveyards

From the Daily Beast:

In a 7,000-year-old town in Bulgaria, over 100 graves have been uncovered, revealing skeletons with stakes through their hearts and mutilated bones. Meet the vampires that almost were. 

Vampires may be greeted with swoons today, but in medieval Eastern Europe they were dealt a metal spike through the chest. 

Last week, Bulgarian archaeologists unearthed an unusual 13th-century grave in an ancient city named Thracian. 

The bones are encrusted in dirt, revealing a bowed, partially crushed skull and a round stake emerging from the left side of the skeleton’s chest. The interred is believed to be a middle-aged man, who was incapacitated post-death—cause unknown—by a two-pound iron rod thrust through his heart and the removal of the lower half of his left leg. Both mutilations were meant to stop the man, who villagers believed was a vampire, from returning to haunt the town and prey upon its inhabitants, researchers say.

Iron was believed to have special properties against the supernatural. Anyway, read the whole thing.