In Germanic areas at one time it was popularly believed that some people made chewing noises whilst lying dead in their graves. This chewing was particularly prevalent during times of the plague. German undead were not called vampires, but "nachzehrer", translated as "night-waster". Their first tendency was to consume their own shroud and extremities, before they moved onto their families.

The Czech "nelapsi" is similar in many regards to the nachzehrer. It also lay with in its grave with open eyes, both rather than the nachzehrer's one, and it also could be quieted by burying it with coins. The nelapsi killed by bestowing glances and it still ascended belfries because it could gaze upon many people at once from such a good vantage point. Applied to witches, this capability to cast spells by a look was known as the "evil eye", and visitors to Greece, the Balkans and Turkey are still able to buy "blue eyes" - ornamental glass icons which are supposedly able to repel the evil eye. Russians believed that undead witches whom they called "eretica" (meaning "heretic") killed their victims by casting the evil eye. In parts of Romania, a pregnant woman who was looked at by a vampire, especially after the sixth month of pregnancy, would give birth to a vampire.

Of course, the primary activity of a vampire proper was to drink blood. Accounts often describe vampires as so gorged with blood that the fluid streamed from every orifice and filled the grave. In less dramatic descriptions there was a modest but tell-tale trickle at the mouth. At the very least, the cadaver's complexion was hale and ruddy.

Some types of undead were capable of sexual activity, although it must be stressed that they were far from the brooding and attractive "demon-lover" archetype that came later in literature, which owe far more to the incubi as antecedents than the vampires. In vampire tradition, the creature seemed to be indulging in the appetites and comforts of the living, rather than becoming a paramour with supernatural powers of attraction. Corpses are sometimes found with erections, or bloating of the penis by putrefaction, at any rate, which must have influenced the development of this libidinous aspect to the undead's character. The nosferatu of Romania were sexually voracious and able to impregnate women. Their offspring became moroii. To the contrary, they also frustrated the fertility of others, particularly newly-weds, by making brides barren and grooms impotent.

Amongst the Gypsies and the Southern Slavs such as the Serbs and the Bosnians, the union of a woman with one of the undead produced a person called a "dhampir", who was uniquely gifted with the ability to fight vampires and see them while in their spectral forms.

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