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While many are willing to entertain the idea that ghosts might exist, far fewer take seriously the possibility of vampires being real. Similarly, the very idea of vampire ghosts likely causes most to scoff or laugh dismissively. As bizarre as it sounds, there are certain locations in the world that are rumored to be haunted by actual vampires. This list features cemeteries, each potentially home to its own bloodsucker or multiple such creatures.
10. Lafayette Municipal Cemetery - Lafayette, Colorado
Certain gravestones seem to have a way of sparking urban legends for reasons unknown. In Rhode Island, the tombstone of Nellie Vaughn, inscribed with the words 'I am Waiting and Watching For You,' became the center of attention for thrill-seekers, turning the deceased woman into a figure of undead lore.
In other places, even simple headstones or tombstones can become symbols of unfounded fear. This is the case with poor Theodore 'Fodor' Glava, an immigrant laborer who died from influenza at the young age of 43. As a pauper, Glava was given a plain gravestone inscribed simply with 'Mr. Glava.' Tragically, he was probably buried in the same coffin as John Trandifir (sometimes spelled Trandofir), another immigrant who shared a cramped eternal resting place due to his modest income.
Over time, a story began to spread, claiming that Glava was a vampire. Allegedly hailing from Transylvania (how convenient!), he was said to be a tall, thin man with dark hair and unnaturally long fingernails. These characteristics were considered all the proof needed to identify him as a vampire.
Upon realizing there was a vampire among them, the residents of North Central Colorado decided to drive a spike through Glava’s heart. This act supposedly not only 'killed' the vampire but also led to the growth of a tree that still stands at the site of Glava’s grave.
Today, one is more likely to encounter curious legend-seekers or paranormal enthusiasts rather than the vampire Glava himself. Still, you never really know.
9. Resurrection Cemetery - Justice, Illinois
When it comes to spiritually active cemeteries, Resurrection Cemetery in Justice, Illinois, truly stands out. This cemetery is best known for the story of Resurrection Mary, the ghostly girl dressed for a party who always asks for a ride home, which just so happens to be Resurrection Cemetery itself.
Other spirits, ranging from floating orbs to fully formed apparitions that leave handprints behind as they flee the vast cemetery, are so commonly encountered that some locals have dubbed the cemetery and the nearby town, located just a few miles south of Chicago, the 'Resurrection Triangle,' in a nod to the mysterious nature of the Bermuda Triangle.
A lesser-known and often overlooked tale is the recurring story of a vampire believed to reside in Resurrection Cemetery. This vampire is said to be heard trying to 'claw its way out' of its grave during the night. While most paranormal investigators attribute these scratching sounds to ghosts, a few curious individuals are convinced that an unnamed vampire makes its nightly escape attempt as the sun sets.
8. Southern Necropolis - Glasgow, Scotland
Situated in Glasgow’s Gorbals district, the Southern Necropolis is an enormous cemetery, housing over 250,000 graves. The site is the final resting place of many notable figures, such as politician John Robertson, architect Alexander Thomson, and Sir Thomas Lipton, the founder of Lipton Tea. In 1954, the cemetery made headlines after an unusual incident involving a police officer named Alex Deeprose.
On the night of September 23, Deeprose responded to a peculiar call at the Southern Necropolis and found hundreds of children wandering the cemetery armed with knives and wooden stakes. The children claimed they were hunting a vampire, said to be 2 meters (7 feet) tall with metal teeth. According to them, the vampire had already claimed the lives of two local boys. However, the school headmaster quickly convinced them that vampires weren’t real. Deeprose also knew that no murders had occurred in Gorbals for quite some time.
Nevertheless, the boys continued to spread rumors of the vampire at school, leading many of them to resume their nightly patrols the following evening. Their vigilance lasted a third night, sparking what would become a minor panic among the children of Glasgow.
Strangely enough, the three-day vampire hunt led to an unexpected alliance between Christians, the National Union of Teachers, and Scottish communists, all of whom pointed fingers at American horror films and comic books for triggering the panic. Even more bizarre, over a decade later, a similar vampire hunt took place at London’s Highgate Cemetery, only this time, it was adults doing the patrolling instead of children.
7. The Erie Cemetery - Erie, Pennsylvania
With a name like 'Erie,' it’s hard to avoid a spooky reputation. Once a bustling economic center in northwestern Pennsylvania, Erie is no stranger to ghostly tales. According to many, however, Erie Cemetery is home to its very own vampire. The Erie vampire is believed to rest in a place known as the Vampire’s Crypt—an imposing mausoleum designed with multiple V-shaped structures stacked on top of one another. The crypt’s eerie appearance has fueled numerous strange ghost stories.
There are claims that the crypt emits an 'unnatural' or suffocating energy, unlike the typical discomfort most people experience in cemeteries. Some even assert that superstitious locals once set fire to the crypt, possibly the same individuals who removed the mausoleum’s name. (Cemetery records indicate that the crypt belongs to the Brown family.)
Two legends related to the crypt further suggest that its occupant is far from resting peacefully. In one tale, a young man climbed the crypt’s walls as part of a dare. When he reached the top, he saw something terrifying and fell. After waking up in the hospital, he saw the same terrifying figure again and fled in fear, ultimately falling to his death. In another version, a widow visiting her husband’s grave was attacked by a pack of feral dogs, believed to be guardians of the Vampire’s Crypt.
There are also claims that the Vampire’s Crypt and the Witches’ Circle, a ring of partially charred headstones within the same cemetery, have been the site of numerous pagan rituals over the years. Perhaps, one of these rituals is what revived the vampire. After all, that’s how it happened in Dracula A.D. 1972.
6. St. Mary’s Churchyard - Tarrant Gunville, Dorset
During the height of vampire superstitions, it was widely believed that those who committed suicide were destined to rise as vampires after death. So, when workers in the village of Tarrant Gunville exhumed the body of 'Old Doggett,' a suicide victim buried in St. Mary’s Churchyard, they were understandably horrified. Old Doggett had ended his life over 100 years earlier in 1762, after his employer, George Bubb Dodington, the owner of Eastbury House, discovered his financial deceit.
In truth, Old Doggett was William Doggett, Dodington’s steward. Doggett had attempted to amass wealth by selling off parts of Eastbury House while his master was away in Italy. Since his death, rumors have circulated that Doggett’s ghost can be seen waiting outside the gates of Eastbury House, anticipating a coach driven by a headless driver.
Other versions of the story suggest that Doggett, his face covered in blood, haunts Eastbury House itself. It is also said that his ghost may wander St. Mary’s churchyard, where his body was laid to rest with a yellow silk ribbon tied around his legs, meant to prevent him from rising again.
5. Dellwood Cemetery - Manchester, Vermont
In 1789, Captain Isaac Burton, a military hero and deacon of a local Congregational church, wed Rachel Harris. The couple was once blissfully happy, but things took a dark turn for Rachel. Once a vibrant and healthy woman, her condition began to deteriorate shortly after marrying Captain Burton. Within a year, Rachel succumbed to tuberculosis.
With little time to grieve, Captain Burton remarried four years later to Hulda Powell. Sadly, Powell, once a vibrant woman, soon fell ill with consumption and passed away within a few years of their marriage. Believing a vampire was haunting him, Captain Burton, with Judge John S. Pettibone, exhumed Rachel’s remains to remove her heart, liver, and lungs.
Once in their possession, the organs were burned to ashes and mixed with water. Captain Burton drank the resulting mixture in an effort to rid himself of the vampire’s curse, while hundreds of townsfolk from the surrounding areas came to Manchester to witness the vampire's destruction.
Today, the graves of Captain Burton and his fourth wife, Dency Raymond, can be found in Manchester’s Dellwood Cemetery. As for Rachel, she was originally buried in the village green, but when the cemetery was relocated to make space for a courthouse, her grave was lost. Some still search for her ghost in Dellwood, but none have found any concrete proof.
4. Santa Paula Cemetery - Guadalajara, Mexico
Santa Paula Cemetery (known locally as El Panteon de Belen) is not only ancient and breathtakingly beautiful, but also reportedly haunted. Many visitors claim to have witnessed apparitions or other eerie phenomena. This cemetery has its share of legends, from tales of hidden treasure to sightings of a 'dog man.' Yet the most unsettling of all is the legend of the vampire tree.
In centuries past, a vampire terrorized the streets of Guadalajara. It began by preying on animals before moving on to infants. After weeks of fear and panic, a group of brave citizens formed a vigilante squad, tracked the vampire down, and drove a stake through its heart. To prevent the creature from rising again, they buried the body beneath heavy concrete slabs.
Somehow, the concrete slabs were cracked by a mysterious tree that sprouted from the vampire’s staked heart. Today, the towering central tree at Santa Paula is linked to this grim legend. It's said that anyone who dares to cut a branch from the tree will witness blood appear. Furthermore, should the tree grow large enough to pull the vampire’s coffin from the earth, the creature will rise again to hunt the living.
3. Hollywood Cemetery - Richmond, Virginia
William Wortham Pool, a bookkeeper hailing from Mississippi, led a rather ordinary life. After moving to Richmond, Virginia, in the 1870s to work at a tobacco shop, he continued his work in the same trade for decades. In short, he was your typical, run-of-the-mill person. When he passed away in 1913 at the age of 80, Pool was buried in Richmond’s Hollywood Cemetery. His simple mausoleum, which now stands at the heart of one of America’s strangest vampire legends, offers little indication of the story that would unfold.
Soon after 1925, rumors about the Richmond Vampire began to spread, spurred by the collapse of a railway tunnel just one month before Halloween. Several workers lost their lives in the Church Hill Tunnel disaster. Some of the more superstitious locals (including some of the men who had been working in the tunnel) believed the collapse had unleashed a vile creature, drenched in the blood of the newly dead. This grotesque being supposedly fled the wreckage and found refuge within Pool’s crypt.
An alternative version of the legend claims that Benjamin Mosby, a railway worker who was horribly mutilated in the Church Hill accident, stumbled into Hollywood Cemetery before dying. Although this is a fabricated tale, along with the rumor that Pool was a vampire exiled from England due to his deeds, it contributes to Hollywood Cemetery’s reputation as one of the most peculiar cemeteries in the U.S.
2. Dummerston Center CemeteryDummerston, Vermont
In 1859, Henry David Thoreau documented how rural New Englanders frequently blamed vampires for the spread of tuberculosis. To combat this affliction, they would exhume the bodies of suspected vampires, remove their hearts and vital organs, burn those organs, and mix them with water to create a concoction believed to cure consumption. This practice was widely followed in Vermont, sparking numerous stories—some partly true, others entirely fictional—of vampire panics throughout the Green Mountain State.
In David Lufkin Mansfield’s book, The History of the Town of Dummerston, he recounts the story of Lieutenant Spaulding, who endured an unimaginable series of losses before the US Civil War. Spaulding's children, all seemingly healthy and under the age of 40, suddenly succumbed to consumption. With only a few of his children left, when one daughter fell gravely ill, Spaulding took matters into his own hands.
Aware of the belief that vines sprouted from the graves of vampires, Spaulding ventured to the gravesite of his children in Dummerston. He carefully removed a vine from the most recent burial and unearthed the body. After burning the heart, lungs, and stomach, he fed the ashes to his sick daughter, who miraculously recovered shortly afterward.
Although Lieutenant Spaulding and his wife rest in unmarked graves, two of the Spaulding children are buried in Dummerston Center Cemetery. If the local stories are accurate, the Spaulding family vampire was eradicated during the 19th century. Nonetheless, people still frequent Dummerston Center Cemetery, hoping to catch a glimpse of a vampire's ghost.
1. CulmenKaldus, Poland
"Culmen" is the Latin term for an ancient burial site in the Polish village of Kaldus, where the deceased were laid to rest beginning in the 10th century. Before being destroyed by Teutonic Knights in the 13th century, Kaldus was a vital city for the Polish crown. As a result, Culmen was a prominent cemetery, containing over 1,000 graves.
In 2007, archaeologists led by Wojciech Chudziak, a professor at Nicolaus Copernicus University, uncovered several skeletons from this medieval cemetery. They found that 14 of these bodies, most showing signs of illness, had been decapitated and buried on their sides. Why? The residents of Kaldus believed these individuals were vampires.
The most frequently reproduced image from the excavation depicts a man and a woman who passed away in the 11th century. During this period, Christianity had not yet fully spread throughout Poland, allowing anti-vampire rituals to thrive.
According to the archaeologists, both individuals had been decapitated posthumously, and several of their bones were crushed beneath large stones. These actions were taken to ensure that the deceased would not rise again as vampires to terrorize the living. The excavation of the Kaldus cemetery is part of a broader series of findings across Poland, revealing that medieval Poles held a deep fear of vampires and took significant measures to protect themselves from the undead.
