It has been established that these spectacular manifestations of vampirism coincided with serious outbreaks of the bubonic plague in those regions. In order to avoid 33. , people rushed to bury the victims of the disease, sometimes without even verifying that they were clinically 34. When the family vault was opened a few days later, the corpses might have been found to be perfectly preserved but spotted with blood. It did not take much to imagine that the corpses had become vampires, while in all 35. the hapless victims suffered a long and horrible death in their coffins and wounded themselves in the vain attempts to break out of their wooden prisons.