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The word “vampire” first appears in English in sensational accounts of a revenant panic in Serbia in the early 18th century. One case in 1725 concerned a recently deceased peasant farmer, Peter Blagojević, who rose from the grave, visited his wife to demand his shoes, and then murdered nine people in the night. When his body was disinterred, his mouth was found full of fresh blood. The villagers staked the corpse and then burned it. In 1745, the clergyman John Swinton published an anonymous pamphlet, The Travels of Three English Gentlemen, from Venice to Hamburgh, in which it is written: “These Vampyres are supposed to be the Bodies of deceased Persons, animated by evil Spirits, which come out of the Graves, in the Night-time, suck the Blood of many of the Living, and thereby destroy them.” And so a modern myth was born.
But it is not so modern, or exclusively European, as this extraordinary survey shows. Instead, the author, a historian and archeologist, argues that belief in the unquiet dead is found in many cultures and periods, where it can lay dormant for centuries before erupting in an “epidemic”, as in Serbia. Where there is no written source, John Blair makes persuasive use of archeological finds in which bodies are found to have been decapitated or nailed down. In 16th-century Poland, a buried woman “had a sickle placed upright across her throat and a padlock on the big toe of her left foot”. Someone, our author infers reasonably, wanted to keep these people in their coffins.
The familiar horror taxonomy of zombies versus vampires and so forth is relatively modern; they are variations on the single ancient theme that dead people can rise from the grave and persecute the living. Blair calls them all “dangerous corpses”, or the “restless dead”, or the “walking dead”. But they still come in different guises, as we learn on this splendidly gruesome journey. Some are “shroud-chewers”, some are “lip-smackers”, some are “suckers”; others are “bloaters”, “damned huntsmen”, “night-stranglers” or “night-mares”, in the original sense of a demon that presses on a person in bed during the dark hours. A 15th-century dead baker in Brittany continued to get up at night to help his family knead dough, but also went around other houses “throwing stones at people”. As late as the 19th century in New England, people who had died of tuberculosis were suspected of killing others from the grave, and so exhumed and incinerated.
Such beliefs can bubble along underground, as it were, for a long time; but bouts of corpse-killing arise, Blair argues, only when an endemic belief system is animated by a particular set of “stresses and anxieties”. In early medieval England, vampire epidemics attended waves of the Black Death; later, in Saxony, the Lutheran Reformation abolished purgatory, and left grieving families with a need for “new answers” about the fate of the dead. The largest known “corpse-killing panic” in history, which ran into the hundreds of bodies, happened in 18th-century Moravia: Blair diagnoses “a sense of unfinished business” over the decades of witch trials that preceded it. Not long afterwards, we find vampires reported for the first time where an innocent might have supposed they were all along: in Transylvania.
In conclusion, Blair argues that killing dead people again is actually “therapeutic”: “Like other extreme rituals, it is distressing at the time but leaves people feeling good afterwards.” And this form of therapy is not yet consigned to history: vampires still harass people in pockets of rural Greece and the Baltics, and a Serbian priest was suspended by his bishop in 2019 for participating in the “exhumation and staking of a woman”.
Alas for Bram Stoker fans, for whom Dracula is the Christmassy terror par excellence, the old count himself gets short shrift here, ticked off for being “very unlike the dangerous corpses in which people have actually believed”. Blair even calls Stoker’s novel “misleading”, which is an odd thing to say about a work of fiction. But he does give the Irishman good marks for coining the excellent word “undead”.
