Vampires from the Deep?

Revenants

The best examples I've found are the "draugs" as described in Norwegian folk tales recorded in the 19th and 20th centuries. In these tales, the draug is most typically the undead, animated body of a person who had drowned at sea and come out of the water at night to attack the living. It isn't clear that they had a special appetite for blood. But the same can be said for many of the Eastern European revenants which are the basis of our fictional, literary vampires.

It seems worth mentioning that in a historic case where, on the Croatian Island of Lastova in the Adriatic Sea, vampires were suspected to be the cause of an epidemic of disease. The vampire hunters' first suspect was a man who had drowned at sea. They were disappointed that they could not find the man's grave to unearth the corpse and impale it with stakes. When the vampire hunters were brought to trial by Church authorities for desecrating graves and corpses, one of them testified that it was a long held belief that those who drowned at sea became vampires. (A transcript of the trial testimony is contained in The Darkling: A Treatise on Slavic Vampirism by Jan L. Perkowski. c. 1989)

Vampire, Gothic and related literature

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