I received this story not long ago. It was send to me by a young reader of my bulgarian blog. It is very interesting encounter so I am translating it in english.
I am 19 years old now and this happened 6-7 years ago. I was in my mother's home village (near Smolyan, I rearly go there). It was almost winter. One of my friends from that village just got brand new air rifle so we went around the village stooting bottles. On our way back to the village we passed by a gully where we saw a figure. We both thought this was a man from the village so we decided to make a joke.
We aproched the man from the back and my friend pointed the now empty gun at the figure while I screamed "Hands Up!" I remember very cleary how long and loud the echo sounded around. Then the man turned with his face toward us. I saw how my friend froze then he dropped the gun on the ground (I still remember this sound too). My friend just whispered "RUN" and started to run up the hill. He was running and crying, from time to time he was turning his head to see if the man was after us. I was running and crying too as I didn't know what was happening.
After 5 minutes we were in my friend's room. I asked him "What happened?" and he replied "that man, they buried him last week". I imediately burst again into tears so load that his parents came to the room. We told them what we have seen. I don't know if they believed us but his father went to take the rifle. Soon he returned. There was no rifle but the look of his eyes was strange. His parents forbid us to go to that place anymore. We think he saw the same dead man walking that we saw.
Original story in bulgarian
Was this a vampire? The notion of vampirism has existed for millennia. Cultures such as the Mesopotamians, Hebrews, Ancient Greeks, and Romans had tales of demons and spirits which are considered precursors to modern vampires. However, despite the occurrence of vampire-like creatures in these ancient civilizations, the folklore for the entity we know today as the vampire originates almost exclusively from early-18th-century southeastern Europe, when verbal traditions of many ethnic groups of the region were recorded and published. In most cases, vampires are revenants of evil beings, suicide victims, or witches, but they can also be created by a malevolent spirit possessing a corpse or by being bitten by a vampire.
“The Vampire”, lithograph by R. de Moraine (1864)
