Once upon a time, wasting away, coughing up blood, and pallor were all once thought to be symptoms of a vampire attack.

These also happened to be the symptoms of tuberculosis, a disease that killed an estimated 100 million people worldwide in the 20th century alone.

Novels like Bram Stoker's 'Dracula' (1897) and more recently Anne Rice's 'Interview with The Vampire' (1976), glamourised vampires, to some extent. But prior to the 19th Century, there was nothing sexy about vampires, and people in many cultures strongly believed in them. Although stories of blood suckers exist in many cultures, stories of actual vampires seem to have originated in the Balkans and Eastern Europe.

Many people from this region believed that vampires were blood sucking corpses, often created when a person was buried improperly or buried before being baptised. There were actual people, mostly priests, who hunted vampires.

The cure was to find the grave of someone suspected of becoming a vampire, dig them up, chop off their head and stick a stake through their heart. Long fingernails and blood in the heart were seen as evidence that the corpse had become a vampire.

One of the last vampire killings is said to have happened in Exeter, Rhode Island, in 1892. Mercy Brown, a 19-year-old farm girl, died very quickly from tuberculosis in January 1892. The disease tore through her family. When her father realised that he was in danger of losing his entire family, in desperation he turned to folklore.

Mercy's body was uninterred, her chest was cut open, and her heart was burned on a nearby rock in the Chestnut Hills Cemetery. The ashes were then fed to her ailing brother Edwin. Unfortunately, as one would expect, the "cure" did not work and Edwin died two months later.

Mercy Brown's grave can still be visited in Exeter. In the 1980s, one of her relatives would keep vigil at her grave at Halloween to prevent people who believed in vampires from trying to dig her up again.