One Stake, Medium Rare

It's no wonder that vampires have become all the rage lately, what with the media of books, television and movies glorifying the existence of the undead, but I think people would have a different viewpoint if they awoke to discover something munching on their brain tissue! Zombies have been added to classical literature in an attempt to get readers to attempt to, uh, read something. A movie is coming out containing the undead during the Civil War in the United States, and folks have even gotten so nutty about the subject that they have been scheduling "vampire vacations," according to the web site eTN.
All of this, naturally, started with Bram Stoker's depiction of Dracula, based on (supposedly) the real-live king in Transylvania Vlad Tepes a.k.a. Vlad "The Impaler" (NOT a professional wrestler but a good name for one) noted for impaling his enemies on sharpened stakes while still kicking, so to speak...as well as screaming, one might suspect.
Adding to the folk curiosity, if only for the tourist euros, comes a story from modern-day Bulgaria where three remains were recently unearthed near the town of Sozopol, located on the Black Sea while an archeological dig was taking place. The three remains shared certain characterisitics: each was judged to be at least 700 years old, and each had a metal or wooden stake implanted just about where one's heart would be located! Bozhider Dimitrov, a Bulgarian archeologist explained that this was a common practice "back in the day" when villagers feared an evil person might be resurrected to continue being less-than-neighborly. Richer villains were staked with metal stakes while the more ordinary cadavers got wooden ones. The calculations concerning dating the remains is important because, at 700 years old, these people would have lived BEFORE Vlad began his messy work.
While there are, no doubt, conspiracy theorists to opine any number of different theories concerning the placement of the stakes, I'm not going to Bulgaria or its neighbor Transylvania any time soon. I prefer to check out the undead via celluloid.
In that way, I can pretend they do not exist.