The original behind the vampire: the Romanian restless dead, who rise from the grave at night to draw the life from the living — beginning, in nearly every account, with their own family. A strigoi does not haunt strangers. The sudden wasting illness of a dead man's relatives, one after another down the bloodline, is the classic presentation in the village record.
The folklore's diagnostics and remedies are concrete: a grave found disturbed from within, a body found unspoiled and flushed months after burial, and the countermeasures — garlic, hawthorn stakes, reburial face-down — that Bram Stoker's sources lifted wholesale. What the fiction omitted is how recent the practice runs: Romanian villages carried out documented exhumations of suspected strigoi well into the twenty-first century, most famously at Marotinu de Sus in 2004, a case that reached the BBC and the courts.
The archive holds the strigoi file as its clearest demonstration that 'folklore' and 'the past' are not synonyms.