Italian researchers believe they have found the remains of a female "vampire" in Venice, buried with a brick jammed between her jaws to prevent her feeding on victims of a plague which swept the city in the 16th century.

Matteo Borrini, an anthropologist from the University of Florence, said the discovery on the small island of Lazzaretto Nuovo in the Venice lagoon supported the medieval belief that vampires were behind the spread of plagues like the Black Death.

"This is the first time that archaeology has succeeded in reconstructing the ritual of exorcism of a vampire," Mr Borrini said. "This helps ... authenticate how the myth of vampires was born."

The skeleton was unearthed in a mass grave from the Venetian plague of 1576 – in which the artist Titian died – on Lazzaretto Nuovo, which lies around 2 miles northeast of Venice and was used as a sanatorium for plague sufferers.

The succession of plagues which ravaged Europe between 1300 and 1700 fostered the belief in vampires, mainly because the decomposition of corpses was not well understood, Mr Borrini said.

Gravediggers reopening mass graves would sometimes come across bodies bloated by gas, with hair still growing, and blood seeping from their mouths and believe them to be still alive.

The shrouds used to cover the faces of the dead were often decayed by bacteria in 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 pestilence in order to suck the remaining life from corpses until they acquired the strength to return to the streets again.

"To kill the vampire you had to remove the shroud from its mouth, which was its food like the milk of a child, and put something uneatable in there," said Borrini. "It's possible that other corpses have been found with bricks in their mouths, but this is the first time the ritual has been recognised."

While legends about blood-drinking ghouls date back thousands of years, the modern figure of the vampire was encapsulated in the Irish author Bram Stoker's 1897 novel Dracula, based on 18th century eastern European folktales.

Vampires and werewolves are familiar monsters to most of us. They star in movies and are popular Halloween costume choices. However, these mystical creatures also share deeper similarities. Both vampires and werewolves are shape-shifting creatures. They are thought to change form from a human to an animal. In the case of a vampire, an undead human can change into a bat at will, especially on a dark and spooky night.

Werewolves, on the other hand, do not have any control over their transformation. They shift shape from human form to wolf-like form whenever they are in the presence of a full moon. Perhaps because vampires are thought to have control over their form, while werewolves do not, each creature has a distinctive set of personality characteristics when stereotyped in film and literature. Vampires are seen as cold, both figuratively and literally.

They are capable of regarding normal humans placidly, with icy sharp logic. The iconic image of a vampire is of a pale man in a cape laughing creepily or simply staring. In contrast, werewolves are seen as passionate and almost animalistic. The iconic image of a werewolf is of a man caught mid-transformation, ripping at his shirt as his body turns from human into fierce and bulky animal. These two creatures also differ in terms of the type of threat they present to humans.

Vampires actively seek humans to kill (or to turn into vampires, depending on the story). They require regular meals of fresh human blood in order to survive, and so they act as literal silent predators. The fear that we feel when watching a vampire movie is the fear of what unknown and alien force might wait hidden in the darkness. Werewolves are not typically described as actively stalking humans, and indeed are often shown as very loving to humans when the moon is new. However, they can hurt human beings when they are in wolf form. The fear evoked at a werewolf movie is the fear of betrayal, the fear of those we trust and care for transforming into something utterly different and destructive.

Vampire. The word conjures up images of suave, handsome, or strikingly beautiful creatures, such as is depicted in Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles. Those of you who are fans of her books are quite familiar with the arrogant and sexy Lestat.

One of the most famous vampires of all time is, of course, Count Dracula. The brain child of Bram Stoker who based his immortal monster on a Hungarian ruler know as Vlad Tepes, also know as Vlad Dracul-a, which when translated means "son of the dragon", a nicknamed that was well earned, for the count was a blood thirsty and ruthless ruler.

He was also known as Vlad the Impaler due to his habit of impaling people on very sharp stakes and letting them suffer until they died a horrible and extremely painful death. The legends of vampires were around long before Stoker wrote his book.

From very early times there have been reports and tales of vampires, or vampyr, which means, when roughly translated, "blood drinker". In nature there are all kinds of vampires. Mosquitoes, tick, fleas, bedbugs, and a species of bat that drinks blood, named most aptly the vampire bat.

But, what about the vampires of legend? Do they exist? There are some well documented accounts that indicate they do.

There was the case of Arnold Paole. It was reported that Arnold was bitten by a vampire while he was serving as a soldier in his country's army. When he returned home from service he became a farmer. One day while cutting hay Paole had an accident which killed him. A few days later, people started dying from loss of blood. The people started saying there was a vampire in their midst.

There were several eye-witness reports that said they had seen Arnold walking around after his death. His eye were glassy and his teeth had grown long and sharp. The locals went to dig up Paole's body, and when the had unearthed the corpse, there was no decay and there was fresh blood on the lips and a bloom of color in the cheeks. Arnold looked as fresh as the day he had died. The locals pounded a stake through the vampire's heart and heard the vampire screech in agony. Then they cut off the head and burned the body. The deaths stopped.