The ancient skeleton, identified as a 35 to 40-year-old male, is only the second-ever skeleton with a spike-driven near its heart in this way, after one that was found last year in the southeastern town of Sozopol.

It is thought the man, considered to be a vampire by his medieval contemporaries, was pinned to his grave using the prongs of a pitchfork – the metal end of a pitchfork – to prevent him from rising at midnight and terrorizing the living.

The discovery was made at the Perperikon site, in the east of the country, during a dig led by the ‘Bulgarian Indiana Jones’ Professor Nikolai Ovcharov.

Last year, a group headed by Professor Ovcharov unearthed another 700-year-old skeleton of a man pinned down in his grave in a church in the Black Sea town of Sozopol.

The skeleton, which quickly became known as the ‘Sozopol vampire,’ was pierced through the chest with a pitchfork and had his teeth pulled out before being buried to prevent him from rising at night and terrorizing the living.

Professor Ovcharov has described the latest finding as the ‘twin of the Sozopol vampire’ and said it could shed light on how vampires believed in the pagan times were persecuted by Christians in the Middle Ages.

Coins found with the body have been dated to the 13th and 14th centuries.

In other cases, Professor Ovcharov said he had found four skeletons ‘nailed to the ground with iron staples driven into the limbs’ but this was only the second case where a pitchfork was used near the heart.

The spokesperson weighs almost 2 pounds (0.9kg) and is dug into the body into the bronchial sounder bone,’ he said.

‘You can clearly see how the collarbone has literally popped out.’

This is the latest in a succession of finds across western and central Europe that shed new light on how people took the threat of vampires.

According to pagan belief, people who were considered bad during their lifetimes could turn into vampires after death unless stabbed in the chest with an iron or wooden rod before being buried.

These ‘vampires’ were often aristocrats, intellectuals, and clerics.

‘The curious thing is that there are no women among them. They were afraid of witches,’ said Bulgaria’s national history museum chief, Bozhidar Dimitrov.

The strong of plague that raged Europe between 1300 and 1700 helped cement an already grim belief in vampires.

Gravediggers reopening mass graves following a plague would sometimes come across bodies bloated by gas, with hair still growing, and blood seeping out of their mouths. The shroud used to cover the face was often decayed by bacteria from the mouth, revealing the corpse’s teeth, and vampires became known as ‘shroud-eaters.’

According to medieval medical and religious texts, the ‘undead’ were believed to spread the pestilence in order to suck the remaining life from corpses until they acquired the strength to return to the streets again.

‘In my opinion, it’s not about criminals or bad people,’ said Professor Ovcharov.

‘Rather, these are precautionary measures that prevent the soul from being taken by the forces of evil in the 40 days period after death.’

Over 100 buried people whose corpses were stabbed to prevent them from becoming vampires have been discovered across Bulgaria over the years.