Shortly before his death, Bram Stoker published Famous Impostors (1910). In this work, the author admits that he has set himself a task potentially limitless in scope:

Imposture, as Stoker understood it, is a phenomenon of vast dimensions spanning all times and places. His book surveys actual cases in which parties “masqueraded in order to acquire wealth, position, or fame,” the history of legendary figures (e.g., the Wandering Jew), instances of mass hysteria (witch trials), and contemporary hoaxes. The topic of imposture, which vacillates between “facts … real and authentic” and “the field of fiction,” invites polygraphy — a single volume could “easily” become “a dozen.”

As previous chapters have shown, the history of vampires fits within Stoker's (admittedly broad) definition of imposture. Among Serbian hajduks in the early eighteenth century, the vampire was a deceased member of the community who impersonated life and spread death. The erudite vampirology that thrived soon thereafter at academies and among the learned in Central Europe yielded no tangible results; instead, the participants in these debates, while purportedly discussing epidemics of undead activity among rustics, competed to discredit their rivals' confessional prejudices and “errors.”