Bulgaria's history museum is going to exhibit a "vampire" skeleton next week after uncovering the 700-year-old remains of two men stabbed through the chest with iron rods.

Archaeologists, dug up a monastery located around the Black Sea city of Sozopol, discovered the skeletons which were buried in a pagan ritual. It is claimed that the pagan ritual was meant to keep men from transforming into vampires.

"This was a pagan belief widespread in the Bulgarian lands in the 12th to 14th centuries. People were very superstitious then," National History Museum head Bozhidar Dimitrov informed.
"Throughout the country we have found over 100 such 'vampire' burials of mainly noblemen from the Middle Ages who were branded bloodsucking immortals."

Dimitrov elaborated on how back then those people were deemed undesirables and bad during their life. Consequently, pagan beliefs inspired the concept of vampirism where some people would become vampires after death and continue to incur suffering upon the living.

"That's why they were often pierced with rods, wooden or metal," he said.