Hunting vampires with the help of DNA profiling

Discovering an old skeleton with the skull and femora in a skull-and-crossbones arrangement would have had many thinking of the Jolly Roger flag and the Golden Age of Piracy. This skeleton’s last resting place was not a pirate’s Caribbean hideout, but an unmarked cemetery in Griswold, Connecticut dating back to the 18th and 19th centuries. Excavated in 1990 after a group of children playing in a gravel quarry stumbled across remains, the cemetery contained over two dozen burials that were fairly unremarkable save one. That one re-arranged skeleton was determined to be a middle-aged man likely considered far more dangerous than a pirate. A vampire.

He was not the only one.