Vampires were never really a thing... What was really a thing and it happened a lot, was burying people alive. It happened because people in the 19th and earlier centuries had no concept of what a coma was. It you didn’t awake after a day or so, they just buried you.
It doesn’t take much of an imagination to guess at what happens next... People digging themselves out of shallow graves and magically coming back to life. That wasn’t the sort of ‘magic’ people were looking for. They likely killed these living dead walkers on site and then reburied them with precautions.
Unless they owed them money....