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 southern town of Sozopol.

It is thought that the man, considered to be a vampire by his medieval compatriots, was pinned to his grave using the stake – the metal end of a plough – 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 ploughshare and had his teeth pulled out before being buried.

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

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

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

‘[The ploughshare] weighs almost 2 pounds (0.9 kg) and is dug into the body into a broken shoulder bone,’ he said.

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

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

According to Bulgarian folklore, people believed that there are no women among them. They were not afraid of witches,” said Bulgaria’s national history chief, Bozhidar Dimitrov.

The strong of garlic found over the years follows a pagan belief in warding off evil in the 40-day period after death. Graves ranged between 1300 and 1700 show evidence of a struggle against vampires.

Guardians rearranged mass graves following a plague or a cholera outbreak, with hair still growing, blood springing from their mouths, and blood-filled veins 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.

‘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-day period after death.’

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