Killing the Dead: Vampire Epidemics from Mesopotamia to the New World, John Blair, Princeton University Press, £30.

One day late in the 12th century, a Buckinghamshire man was buried. This should have been the end of his story, but then he turned up in his wife’s bedroom. For two nights he ‘not only frightened her, but almost suffocated her with his unbearable overlying weight’ – after which the woman had understandably had enough, and employed guards to drive him away. But the trouble continued: the dead man pestered his brothers (who were equally unwelcoming), and then he took to dancing around wildly among the animals in and near the houses. Soon, he began to wander during the day, causing widespread terror.

Though only a few of the villagers could see the man, all could sense his presence, and everyone agreed this was not a ghost, but a walking corpse. Consequently, many believed that their problems would only end if his body was exhumed and burnt. But then Hugh, the saintly Bishop of Lincoln, provided a written absolution which was placed in the man’s coffin, and his wanderings ceased.

Perhaps the strangest element of this very strange story is that it was not a unique event: at least ten such disturbances were recorded in 12th century England alone, several of them by the Augustinian canon and chronicler William of Newburgh. He became fascinated by this troubling phenomenon, admitting that it ‘would be hard to credit if there were not numerous modern cases and abundant reports’. He had, he claimed, heard so many of these stories that he could not write them all down.

William believed that revenants were a new problem, since, despite painstaking searches, he could find no references to them in ‘books from old times’. Fortunately, John Blair, Emeritus Professor of Medieval History and Archaeology at the University of Oxford, has had more success in his research, so that this original and wide-ranging study uncovers ample evidence of vampire belief from across the world, ranging from ancient times to the present.

The first surviving records of the walking dead come from ancient Mesopotamia, where the tomb of Queen Yabâ (who lived and died in 8th century Nimrud) threatens that the gods will impose ‘eternal not sleeping on the corpse and ghost’ of anyone who disturbs her rest. Though there is little evidence of such beliefs in ancient Greece and Rome, they re-emerged in early medieval Europe. In the 590s, Gregory the Great told stories about dead sinners who were condemned to work in the Roman public baths; these unfortunate creatures were sufficiently physical beings to hold bathers’ clothes and to feel pain when forced to stand in hot water.

In early medieval China, there was particular concern about sexually predatory female corpses. In one striking story, a prefect has a months-long affair with a beautiful woman, which ends abruptly when she learns that her husband is coming to visit. Before parting, the lovers exchange gifts: she leaves him a silver cup to remember her by, and he gives her ten pieces of silk. But when the husband arrives, he recognises the cup, which he placed in his wife’s grave several months earlier. After the prefect confesses all, the angry widower exhumes his wife. Finding the cup missing and the silk in her well-preserved arms, he has her body burnt.

This case, Blair argues, hints at one recurrent motivation for destroying corpses, namely anxiety about female agency. Similar fears were, he thinks, behind a wave of corpse-killing in 7th century England, where women wielded considerable authority as abbesses and healers. The victims (including a teenage girl, buried with grave goods suggesting spiritual powers, whose corpse was beheaded and broken at the knees) were almost exclusively female. Elsewhere, there was unease about women who died in childbirth, so that Burchard of Worms (writing c.1010) urged confessors to ask women: ‘Have you done what certain women, inspired by the Devil, are in the habit of doing… When some woman needs to give birth but cannot, and dies in that misery, during her fruitless labour, they transfix both mother and infant with a stake driven into the earth in the same grave.’

More broadly, corpse-killing tended to occur at times of social and political unrest – perhaps because, Blair argues, the practice provided a useful safety valve in unsettled times. In Reformation Saxony, for example, there was considerable concern about corpses which ate their shrouds (and, less frequently, their own body parts) – a process which was revealed by lip-smacking noises coming from the grave, and which caused disease and death in the local area. When Martin Luther was consulted about one such incident, he replied that they were a product of ‘the Devil’s deceit and malice’, insisting that people would not die if they asked forgiveness for their sins, and stopped being so superstitious. But many continued to believe that the only answer was to cut off the corpse’s head.

As Luther’s response suggests, belief in the undead has never been universal, and scepticism grew throughout the early modern period. In 1755, during a vampire outbreak on the South Habsburg border, Empress Maria Theresa issued a decree against corpse-killing, a practice which ‘often involved superstition and fraud’; her firm stance was supported both by Pope Benedict XIV (1740-58), a confirmed vampire-sceptic, and her personal physician, Gerard van Swieten, who wrote that such things happened only ‘in areas where ignorance still prevailed’. In France, Voltaire asked scornfully: ‘What? This is our 18th century, and there are vampires?’

To which question, for many ordinary people, the answer remained: yes, there are. In late 18th and early 19th century New England, the undead were often blamed for spreading tuberculosis, especially if several family members died of the disease in quick succession. Thus Sarah Tillinghurst (d. 1799) was held responsible for the subsequent deaths of her five sisters; when her mother and brother also sickened, her coffin was opened to reveal a corpse in excellent condition, its heart and arteries suspiciously full of fresh blood. In other parts of the world, fear of the undead has survived into the 21st century: a Bulgarian priest was temporarily suspended for participating in the staking of a suspected vampire as recently as 2019.

Given the weight of the evidence, it is hard to disagree with Blair’s conclusion that corpse-killing was both widespread and enduring, although not everyone will be convinced by his suggestion that it was likely as widespread as, and as significant as, witch-hunting. Nevertheless, the two phenomena have much in common: both simmered away beneath the surface before suddenly erupting into panics, and both manifested in extremely varied ways. For much of history, there was no such thing as a typical revenant; only after the publication of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) did the stereotypical bloodsucking vampire become the norm.

But witch-hunting is much better documented than corpse-killing, for which the sources are often fragmented and hard to interpret. Blair makes a forceful case for a more open-minded approach to material evidence, arguing that archaeologists have often been too keen to explain away possible signs of corpse mutilation (such as decapitation, maimed limbs, and charring) by automatically reaching for more prosaic explanations, such as grave-robbing. He takes a similarly optimistic approach to the textual sources, even though these, too, pose challenges – for, as he acknowledges, it is possible to tell stories about seemingly ‘real’ vampires without actually believing in them.

This boundary between fact and fiction became especially blurred after the invention of print, which triggered a wave of lurid publications – including the first modern vampire novel, an early 17th century work loosely based on the story of Johann Kunze (d. 1592). A rich man from a Moravian mining town, Kunze died after being kicked in the testicles by a horse; on his deathbed he rejects all hope of salvation, and is buried during a thunderstorm. For months afterwards, his revenant causes chaos, riding around on a horse, strangling sleepers and making hog-like noises in the minister’s kitchen. Eventually, even the minister (who initially repeats the conventional Lutheran arguments about demons) concedes that an exhumation is necessary. Kunze’s well-preserved corpse is dug up, pours with blood, and is burnt.

Kunze (or at least the fictional version of him) was typical of troublesome corpses in the sense that he had unfinished business: his many sins, which included a pact with the Devil, meant that he could not rest in peace. But other restless corpses were themselves victims, something having gone wrong in the death rituals which were meant to ease their passage to the afterlife. Skolt Sámi tradition suggested that over-hasty burial would turn a corpse into ‘a man-eating ghost, with teeth made of iron’, and it was quite widely believed that, if a cat jumped across a corpse, it would reanimate. Though such fears now seem ridiculous, this gory yet sensitive study makes a powerful case that we can only really understand the past if we take its most outlandish beliefs seriously.