The idea of vampires has been romanticized in the United States for decades. While there is almost always the element of evil involved, time and again Hollywood enterprises have injected the notion of good vampires, vampires with souls, crime-fighting vampires, and vampire love stories into what had always traditionally been the story of undead servants of Satan, feeding upon the blood of the living.

TV shows and movies like Buff the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Interview With the Vampire, True Blood, Blade, From Dusk tip Dawn, The Lost Boys, and the Twilight books and movies all have taken the fictional idea of vampires and run it to profitable ends.

But in some places, vampires are taken very seriously. Like in Poland for instance, where construction workers building a road unearthed four bodies that were buried in a very unusual way. According to Spiegel, their heads had ben severed and placed in their own hands or between their knees. Archaeologists say this form of burial signals one thing: these people were seriously thought to be vampires; and this kind of burial was intended to prevent them from rising from he dead again.

The bodies were buried with no clothes or jewelry on, and many times the skulls were weighted down with a stone. Which is still a better love story than Twilight.

Archaeologists now believe that the bodies date from the 15th or 16th centuries, when the fear of vampires was widespread in Eastern Europe.

In 2012 archaeologists in Bulgaria had found bodies of two other people who must have been considered vampires. They had been pierced through with stakes.

Scientists are working to determine the cause of death for the bodies found. They were discovered not far from an ancient execution site, a gallows where prisoners were hanged.

Much of vampire lore that is familiar to people nowadays has been the product of Hollywood tales of how vampires are made and how they can be killed.