Similar reports are still made today. Vampire lore goes back much further than the late nineteenth century, when Bram Stoker was writing, however. In ancient times, people sometimes reported seeing vampires. For example, the ancient Greeks spoke of there being numerous vampires on the island of Santorini (now Thera). Believers say that such early accounts are particularly credible because they predate vampire novels. Some scholars, however, argue that early stories about vampires at least those that come from Western cultures can be attributed to the fact that until modern times, people were sometimes accidentally placed in coffins before they had actually died, which resulted in documented cases of “dead” bodies rising from their coffins.