'Vampire' discovered in mass grave

Summary

March 6, 2009: A skeleton of a woman was exhumed in Venice which was believed to be that of a vampire at the time of her death. She was buried during a plague in 1576 in a mass grave with a brick in her mouth. It was thought at the time that vampires spread the plague by biting on their shrouds after death, and the brick was inserted to stop them from doing that.

Source

Bibliography

1. Original article

Game and Story Use

• This variant of vampires can take players by surprise who are more used to modern-day vampire variants.
• Perhaps the player characters have learned of such vampires, and encounter a city suffering from the usual plague spread by the vampires. But no one believes their claims about the origin of the plague. Thus, they will need to find the responsible vampire by themselves - which might involve digging up a lot of recent graves, preferably without getting caught by the authorities in the process…
  • Or the PCs are investigating someone who is digging up graves and leaving bricks in the mouths of selected corpses…