Driving a stake through the heart was the traditional way to kill a vampire (and/or werewolf and/or zombie -- a folkloric creature that wouldn't die normally, but needed to be destroyed and kept that way). Note (from the comment below) that this was a way of "killing" someone who was already dead; a corpse which was believed to be a vampire or thereabouts would be exhumed, staked, and buried again.
(Customs were highly variable, though. This was a superstition, a folk or "underground" belief, which never had a universal form and was not looked on kindly by any Western religious authority -- Christian, Jewish, or Islamic -- that I've ever heard of.)
A spike is a large nail, the kind that was used to nail rails to ties in old-fashioned railroad construction.
Could this expression originally have been "drive a stake through the heart"?
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