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Mutilated corpses and undead mothers-in-law: vampire epidemics through history
00:38:49
John Blair charts how fears of the undead rising from their graves have recurred in societies around the globe throughout history
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- [00:00]
A
This is the story of the 1. As head of maintenance at a concert hall, he knows the show must always go on. That's why he works behind the scenes, ensuring every light is working, the H Vac is humming, and his facility shines with Grainger's supplies and solutions for every challenge he faces. Plus 24. 7 customer support. His venue never misses a beat. Call quickgranger.com or just stop by Granger for the ones who get it done.
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B
Welcome to the History Extra podcast. Fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History magazine. Fears of the undead rising from their graves to cause trouble have occurred in societies across the globe and over history. But why was your mother in law especially likely to become a vampire? What makes Count Dracula a highly unusual bloodsucker? And how would you best mutilate a vampire's corpse to neutralise the threat they posed? Well, Professor John Blair has looked at humanity's long history of vampire beliefs for his book Killing the Dead and I spoke to him to find out more. Let's start, I think with the title of your book, Killing the Vampire Epidemics from Mesopotamia to the New World. So what do we mean when we're talking about vampire epidemics?
- [01:31]
C
This is not a book about ghosts. That's the first thing I want to say. It's a book about corpses. It's the belief that corpses are animated after death in one way or another. So they may be walking around, they may be getting climbing out of their graves and walking around, or they may be lying in their graves but exerting some evil influence which causes harm to people in one way or another. But the crucial thing is people believe that the actual corpse has still got some sort of life or power inside it.
- [02:03]
B
Yeah. And your book is a really wide spanning study of these beliefs. So when do we see beliefs about the dead coming back to life to cause mischief emerge? And what societies have we seen them occur in over history?
- [02:17]
C
So I tried to make this a worldwide coverage, which of course is difficult because some societies are documented much more than others. There is some archaeological evidence from prehistory, including way back to the Paleolithic, which might suggest these beliefs. But they first appear in written sources more or less, with the earliest written sources in Mesopotamia and the very earliest Mesopotamian texts. Don't mention it. But when we get to the Neo Assyrian period around the 7th century BC, we start to get some texts which do appear to refer to what happens, what you should do if corpses start walking around. If they rise up, they complain, they fight against their bandages, maybe fight against Something stuck in the mouth, which is interesting because that is a motif that turns up much later. So I think we can say that in the early centuries BC it starts to emerge into written history.
- [03:19]
B
So this is an incredibly old story we're looking at here. So we begin in Mesopotamia, but where else do we see these epidemics, as you call them, emerge?
- [03:29]
C
I think the important question there is whether it's hardwired in the human psyche or not.
- [03:33]
B
Yes, well, I was gonna ask you that, so let's touch on it now.
- [03:36]
C
Okay. Well, Freud thought that it was, and he wrote that people think that their dead relatives are evil demons. I think that's wrong. I think there's a human propensity to think that corpses are a bit disconcer, inserting in one way or another. I think that is a constant. But it's only certain societies that think they're actually physically doing harm. And it seems to turn up in what I've called in the book the Vampire Belt. That is a big stretch of the world going from northwestern Europe, not particularly southern Europe, but across Eastern Europe into the near east, and then across to China and Southeast Asia. And I think what's interesting is that all these societies have in common, that the north, towards the North Pole, there are societies with belief in shamans, in animal spirit helpers, in human mediation between the animal and the spirit worlds. And I think that background in shamanistic beliefs is one ingredient. So that's just one ingredient. But the other ingredient is the more personal one, that you think that actual individual people, people, you know, maybe you liked them when they were alive, maybe you didn't like them, but they're now dead. You think that they're coming in to do harm. And. And that seems to be triggered by a complex of quite varied factors. Spiritual, religious, ritual, but also in particular triggered by situations of trauma where people want to look for a victim.
- [05:05]
B
And I'm keen to get into some of those factors later in this conversation. A somewhat bizarre technical question before we go any further, John. Why are we talking about vampires here, not zombies, if we're talking about undead corpses? What's the differentiation you make there?
- [05:20]
C
Well, the vocabulary is interesting and is actually quite misleading. First thing to say is that the word vampire comes from a Proto Turkic word which comes in other societies has. For example, Turkish has versions like upir obia. Upir in Polish, for example, originally seems to mean a sucking demon. Not necessarily sucking blood. Maybe sucking blood, but that seems to be the root of that particular word. In the Middle Ages, and most of the early modern period. It's not actually used, at least in northern Europe, for walking corpses. And it seems that the point at which the vampire root word comes to be used is in the early 18th century, when beliefs from northern Europe are meeting up with beliefs from the Balkans and the Black Sea area. And in fact, the first appearance of the word vampire in print is in the late 1720s. It very quickly became very popular. It swept the board, it eliminated all other vocabulary. So people talk about vampires in contexts where the word was never used. Now, in the case of zombie, that's different. That's an African word that originally just means a ghost, but it comes to refer to a corpse, or rather one might say an apparent corpse in the very peculiar situation of Haiti, where it applies to people who appear to be dead but are not really dead. They've actually been poisoned, they've been buried. Then wicked magicians dig them up and make them work on their plantations. So in other words, they're walking corpses that are not really corpses. So it's important to keep the word zombie, I think, for that particular context. In the book, I usually use phrases like dangerous, dead, walking, dead, undead, which was invented by the author of Dracula. It's quite a useful word. I've tended to limit my use of the word vampire.
- [07:11]
B
Well, you mentioned Dracula there, and this idea that we have today, we have a very set idea of what a zombie is and what a vampire is. You say in the book something really interesting, which is Count Dracula bears little resemblance to any monster in whom real people have believed. So what did these monsters that predate Dracula, these vampires, what do they look like instead?
- [07:33]
C
Well, if I could begin with Dracula to say, what's wrong? Well, for a start, he's centuries old at the time when he's acting, he's an aristocrat. In the book, we see him in action, biting people, sucking their blood. He's wily, resourceful, he makes plans. None of that applies to the dangerous corpses that people actually believed in. Certainly in Europe, where tended to be quite recently dead people, they tend to be ordinary people. Their motivation is actually quite obscure. They occasionally talk a bit, they don't talk much. They don't seem to be capable of making very coherent plans. Nor do we actually see them doing their fell work. We only see the results of it afterwards. And then we see the corpses when the grave is open. We don't actually see them in action. Bram Stoker read up a lot about a particular episode in Serbia in the 1720s, which is actually rather abnormal in many ways, and then he embroidered that for dramatic effect for the book. So the end result is really very misleading. And I think if you want to understand what people really believed in, then forget about Count Dracula.
- [08:38]
B
Good advice. So if we are going to look at these more real life cases of vampire belief, you mentioned that they were generally ordinary people. Can we make any kind of categorizations about what type of people became vampires?
- [08:53]
C
Yes. So it varies very much between different societies, both in Europe and in Asia. But there are certain categories of people. They don't necessarily have to be evil in life, though they can be. A more important factor is what happens at the time of death. So if the process from death to burial has not been carried out properly. So if something's gone wrong at the wake or at the funeral ceremony, in particular in Greece, where it's absolutely crucial that the body is watched between death and burial. And some strange things are really, really scary. For example, if a cat jumps over the body, that's really, really bad. The person may have been a saint, but if the cat jumps over the corpse, then they become a vampire and you have to deal with them. That's an extreme case. It's often people whose lives are being cut short untimely. And an important factor in all this is lack of completedness. The people are cut short. Their life forces have not just dissipated in the normal way. They are still pent up in the body, and that means trouble. Now, there is one particular category of people that's very important, and I think people don't really realize that, which is young women. And something that's generally not realized is that in many cultures the dangerous dead have been largely female, and in particular women between the ages of about 15 and 25. In some societies like Anglo Saxon England, it seems that these women were regarded as powerful, wise women or magical practitioners. When they get older, it seems in some societies like that, gradually their powers fade away and pass on to younger women. But if they die, then the powers are still caught up in the body. And there are some similarities here with things like poltergeist phenomena, which are often associated with adolescent women. And it's the same kind of idea, I think, also women who die in childbirth, women who die unmarried, a sense of unfulfilledness, resentment in some cases. For example, ancient Mesopotamia, the demon Lamashtu who is thrown out of heaven, or also Lily who is childless and therefore preys on the children of other people. And this is carried through into much later cultures. So overall, I think it's a sense that Business is not completed.
- [11:19]
D
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E
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- [12:55]
B
Something you said earlier that intrigues me is that the motivations of these vampires were sometimes quite obscure. So should we think of them as evil beings? Like, what were they out for? What did they want?
- [13:07]
C
There's a lot of variation in that. In some contexts, it looks as though they're just sort of powerful. Especially medieval and earlier societies with a strong tradition of magical practitioners. It sometimes seems to be just that. They. They can't stop. You know, they've died, but they want to go on doing what they do. And so you've got to just put them firmly back in their place, settle them in their grave, make sure that they don't cause any trouble. Sometimes they are genuinely evil people. It's often nasty people, I think is the best way to put it. People who are quarrelsome, grumpy, resentful. The expression mood hoover, I think is quite a good one. You know, people who kind of SAP other people's energy. And of course, you know, all of us probably know people who seem, in a sense, vampiric in this way, that they're kind of drawing one's energy. And I think it's often these people in the past who were regarded as high risk cases after death. But it does vary from society to society. For example, if you compare iceland in the 11th century, where there's very interesting evidence, they tend to be what we would think of as neighbours from hell, Literally neighbours from hell. They're tiresome, quarrelsome, dishonest, grumpy neighbours who just go on being a real nuisance after they die. If you look at what's happening in England at the same time, where there's also quite a lot of evidence for the, for the epidemic, because England is a more settled society, it's a more law governed society, the criminality is emphasized more. They're people who are oath breakers, faithless, dishonest, and they come furtively out of their graves, even. They're sometimes. They're people who are actually quite important and high status in life. They can come out of their graves and just be a source of poison and illness and death until they're dealt with.
- [14:52]
B
What exactly are these vampires doing? As you say, they're kind of a source of bad vibes. But like, what could a vampire do to harm you?
- [15:00]
C
The story is typically that they are seen wandering around, they attack people. An important element of this is the psychological effect, which is a real effect called sleep paralysis, where people wake up in the night, they can't move, they feel something is sitting on them. Now, if you visualize that entity sitting on you, which is extremely real and concrete, you visualize that as a real person who's died recently, then of course you very easily think that it's their actual corpse that's doing it. So people are ill, people die, suspicions are aroused. But the crucial thing then is opening the grave. So the grave is opened and the corpse is found to be uncorrupt. It's not decayed. That's the crucial thing. There may be other signs, like it's bloated with blood, or its face or mouth is stained with blood, and then you have to take the appropriate measures. I will say here, there's one other very important variant on this, which is the corpse that doesn't walk around, it just stays in the grave. But by some mysterious process that's not really properly described, it still injures people. So the remedy is exactly the same. You open the grave, you see what's happening and you deal with it.
- [16:13]
B
You used a great euphemism there. You take the appropriate measures. What are those appropriate measures?
- [16:19]
C
So the appropriate measures are mentioned in a lot of texts. They're also extremely helpful because we can recognise them sometimes in archaeology, and they take a range of forms. You can turn the body over. That's perhaps the gentlest method. You can tie the legs back so they don't walk. Or then you can start doing more interventionist things. You can break the legs, you can cut off the feet, or if you want to go further than that, and that doesn't solve the problem, you can cut off the head. And this is an important thing in some European medieval contexts. Separate the jaw from the skull, put it in a different part of the grave so the corpse can't bite, swallow or talk. Or you drive a stake or an iron bar or something through the heart. Now, of course, if it's just a wooden stake, in most archaeological context, you don't see it because it's decayed. You do it occasionally, if it's a nail or an iron spike, you do see it. Or you cut out the heart completely, you take it away and burn it. Or in an extreme case, you take the whole corpse out and burn it. And that has certainly happened in quite a lot of cases. So there's a spectrum, all kinds of things you can do. Some of them are visible archaeologically, some are not, but they're all described in texts.
- [17:37]
B
That's really interesting. I was going to ask you about that, where we're getting this information from. So is it a combination of archaeology and texts? And what are some of the most fascinating ones that have been uncovered about this?
- [17:48]
C
Yes, it's a combination of archaeology and texts. And of course, the archaeology can be from any period. The difficulty with that is, of course, there are other reasons for mutilating corpses. So obviously, if a corpse is just beheaded, you can't assume it's for that reason that it could have been executed or. Or it could have been a shaming act. If you get a combination of, let us say, cutting off the feet, removing the lower jaw, taking out the heart, you know, those together, that is a pretty clear sign. Texts from Europe from the 11th century onwards mention these various measures. Burckhardt of Worms, who's a cleric writing in the Rhineland in the early 11th century, talks about driving stakes through corpses of children who've died young, or mothers who've died in childbirth, because they are dangerous cases. And then in the Icelandic stories, we have mainly burning. In the English stories, we have the whole range. We have cutting off the head, cutting out the heart and burning. There's a particularly remarkable story that comes from a place near Burton on Trent, and it's set around 1090. Some peasants have died Suddenly, they've sworn false oaths and they are seen wandering around carrying their coffins on their backs, and they knock on doors, they say, come on, get a move on, get out of there. And then the people die. So the inhabitants get permission from the bishop to dig them up, and the bodies are undecayed and the cloths on their faces are soaked in blood. They cut off their heads, put them between their feet, cut out the hearts, burn them, and the surviving victims recover. Now, extraordinary thing about this, and actually this was what first interested me in this subject. I read that story, I then read a book about modern Romanian folklore, and I discovered exactly the same process which actually still happens in Romania. A very well attested case was in 2004. The last case known to me was in 2019. And I thought, extraordinary that the same detailed procedure in 11th century England and modern Romania, what's behind it? That was really what got me onto this subject.
- [19:51]
B
It's quite intense. The mutilation of corpses doesn't sit well with a lot of people today, and I'm intrigued as to how it sat with different religions in history and different belief systems over time.
- [20:04]
C
Yes, that is an interesting question. With Christianity, it's ambiguous, of course, really, in. In strict Christian theology, the idea that a soul is still hanging around in the body is just not on. It's completely contrary to theology. You know, depending on whether you're Catholic or Lutheran or whatever, you know, the soul's gone. It's gone to heaven or hell, or it's gone to purgatory. It's not still hanging around in the body. But there are other ways of rationalizing it, one of which is that a demon is occupying the body. So a common way for ecclesiastics throughout the Middle Ages and into the early modern period is to say it's not the actual dead person. They've gone, that's fine. But the corpse has got to be neutralized because a demon has hijacked it. You know, a demon is taking a free ride in the corpse. It's using it as a vehicle, and so you've got to mutilate the corpse. And those beliefs, I mean, in some areas of Catholic theology, those beliefs go right down to the mid 18th century. So although in theory it's completely incompatible with Christian theology, it is in fact made compatible. In the case of Islam, we don't know very much because it doesn't seem to be mentioned much in Islamic cultures, except for those parts of Eastern Europe that were under Turkish rule between the 15th and 18th centuries. And there you do get some comment from Islamic clerics, which basically is, if it's the corpus of a believer, you just fill it in and leave it and hope for the best. It can't do any harm, but you don't mutilate it. So it's really, in Christian culture, sanction the mutilation. And a wide range of other societies, including ones believing in many gods or systems of demons, those also sanction it.
- [21:38]
B
And just to stay for a moment on the societal conditions that might allow for these beliefs to flourish, something you mentioned in your book, which I didn't expect, was family structure. Can you explain that connection to us a bit?
- [21:51]
C
Yes. This tends to be in societies where there are multi generational families, by which I mean, you know, three generations or sometimes even more. And in particular societies where elderly women, matriarchal women, grandmothers are in charge. And this goes, I mean, particularly in parts of Eastern Europe and Russia, it's the mother in law who really looks after the house, keeps the keys, keeps the keys to the drink cupboard. In particular, she's really in charge. And it's those powerful matriarchal women who are sometimes seen as a threat by younger generations. And that can happen in two ways. One is daughter in law can feel very overshadowed. And so it's easy to think when the mother in law at last has died, well, maybe she hasn't really died. She's actually still exercising her domineering power over her descendants. The other context is where, particularly in the modern world, where family structures tend to break up, modernity has an impact. It may be that the older generations think they should control the marriages of the younger generations. The younger generations think, no, they do their own thing. But then they may feel unconsciously guilty. And there are some interesting examples of that from Romanian Wallachian migrants to Sweden in the 1960s and 70s. They were economic migrants, they developed some Swedish habits, they broke away from their families, but several of them thought that their dead grandmothers were coming back and abusing them for marrying against their wishes. So it's to do with intergenerational conflict, conflict between mothers in law and daughters in law. It seems to be a way of symbolizing or sort of expressing in concrete form these sorts of emotional tensions.
- [23:30]
B
I have to say the grandmother or mother in law as a vampire is a very intriguing idea. I mean, I'd love to see a horror movie about that. Something that I think could be an interesting parallel here, obviously not a direct one, is witch panics. Witch hunts that emerged especially across Europe in the early modern period. You mentioned trauma as a societal condition that could lead to some of these beliefs. I wonder if you could draw that out a bit for us.
- [23:55]
C
Yes. So the parallel with witch hunting is very interesting, and indeed. I'll come in a minute. To the question of victims, James, generally, and scapegoats. It's part of, I think, of a larger picture. But of course, witches are living people, so they're different from spirits and ghosts. Corpses, of course, are dead people. They're different from witches in that respect. But what they have in common with witches is they're physical, unlike ghosts and spirits, they can be hunted, tracked down, punished, mutilated, or destroyed. So there is a sense in which corpse persecution is very similar to witch persecution. What's interesting in Europe in the Middle Ages through to the 17th century is that they seem to be alternative responses. So where you get corpse persecution, you don't get witch persecution, similarly with heresy. So in 12th century France, there is persecution of heretics, but not persecution of corpses. In England at the same time, there is persecution of corpses, but not of heretics. And I wonder if there is a connection there. Similarly, in Europe between the 16th and 18th centuries, on the whole, the places where corpses are persecuted are not the places where witches were persecuted. There is one exception to that in part of what's now the Czech Republic in the late 17th century, where there seems to be a direct succession from witch persecution to corpse persecution. But even so, in that case, the one is replaced by the other. So I think it's part of the general psychology of trying to find a scapegoat when you're in a bad position.
- [25:31]
B
One area I did want to ask you about was America. Can you tell us about vampires in America?
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C
Yes. And this is a very interesting and strange aspect of the whole story. Just at the point when these beliefs are starting to become marginalized and disapproved of in Central Europe, they're actually getting going in the United States. And it looks as though there are two sources for this. One is the Germans who emigrated to Pennsylvania in the 18th century, who maintained a very distinct community. They were still speaking German into the 20th century, and they took some of these beliefs with them. And in particular, the idea that the inert corpse lying in the grave chews its own shroud, which is something that you get in Reformation Germany. A corpse is chewing its shroud, and as it does this, people die of plague in the German case. But the point is that in America, after the end of the 18th century, there's a new scourge which is tuberculosis. And so people apply this old belief to the new horror of tb. And so the Shroud Shoer belief appears in Pennsylvania. But then in New England from the 1780s onwards, ideas that are spread perhaps by quack doctors, people practicing various forms of alternative medicine, often people of German origin, these ideas are getting around, particularly in places like Connecticut, Rhode island, and the form it takes, there is not corpses walking around, the corpse lies in the grave, but it's the organs, especially the heart, the liver and the lungs, which somehow exert a malign influence on the living, especially living relatives. And the idea is that, let's say you've got a family, large family, one child dies of tb, People think that so long as the child is lying undisturbed in the grave, their internal organs are drawing their siblings after them. Another child dies, another child dies. Eventually they dig up the first one, cut out the heart and lungs and burn them, and they think that's going to end it. And the last New England corpse killing of that sort happened in 1892. So it went on right up to the end of the 19th century. And in Pennsylvania, incredibly, the rather watered down version of this belief, which is that if a corpse is buried in garments belonging to somebody else, it will have the same effect, it will make people ill. In 1949, believe it or not, the corpse of a general infantryman in Pennsylvania was dug up. The uniform that he was wearing, he was buried in, which belonged to somebody else, was removed and burnt, which I think is the last known corpse killing in a western society outside the Aegean and outside the Balkans.
- [28:19]
B
Wow. It's extraordinary stuff. I mean, you have so many incredible stories in the book, texts and sources of these stories about vampires coming back from the dead. What are some of the ones that you personally found most intriguing?
- [28:33]
C
I think I found the whole thing intriguing, perhaps most of all, the interplay between what people believed and what educated people wrote down and published. And you might think those are two different things, or that books report what people believe, but it's not as simple as that, because it's a two way process. Popular culture can circulate into print, but print can also circulate back into popular culture. I'll give you a particularly extraordinary example of that, which is the. In some ways, this is the most perhaps revolting of all the aspects of this subject. The practice of drinking blood from suspected vampire corpses as a means of finding an antidote to their predations. Now, this is mentioned in a pamphlet published in Paris in the 1690s, which says that in Poland, corpses are dug up and when they're found bloated with blood, the head is cut off, blood comes out, and people drink the blood and they make it into little cakes, they bake it into bread and they eat it. And after that, the corpse loses its power. And there are actually reported cases from 18th century Poland where this is believed to have happened. Judges accused people of it, and just like witch trials, well, we know you did this. You know, you own up to it, and eventually they own up to it. However, what I discovered in what in some ways was the most extraordinary revelation in the whole thing, was that in a book published about 10 years earlier than the French pamphlet published in Italy in the 1680s about West Africa, about Angola, precisely the same story, this story about drinking blood actually refers originally to West Africa. It was hijacked by a plagiarizing authority in late 17th century Paris. That pamphlet circulated and educated people then believe that this is what Polish peasants really did. And so they accused them of it. And of course, eventually they were made to confess. It's an extraordinary example of smoke and mirrors creating a practice which seems eventually, really sometimes happened, but is actually created by a mirage.
- [30:41]
B
And an interesting example of how these ideas can spread in unexpected ways as well. Some of the stories that you look at in the book, they're. They're not just scary, some of them are quite sad and moving as well. I wonder if you could give us any examples of those.
- [30:55]
C
Yes, some of these people, of course, are. The very fact that they're unquiet means that they've died in sad or deprived circumstances. And one genre of that is the young woman who's dead and comes back to find a living male lover. And this is a genre that seems to appear in the early centuries ad, both in China and in the Eastern Roman Empire. It's very interesting. And it looks as though it must be Silk Road's contacts that are spreading this story. And the template is the unsuspecting young man is befriended by a young woman. They develop a sexual relationship, but then it emerges that actually she's dead. And there are some Chinese stories along these lines. There's a particularly famous one from a. A Greek compilation surviving from the early second century A.D. about a young man called Makates who stays in a guest house in a Greek town. And a girl called Filinian visits him at night. They become lovers, they exchange love tokens. But then the nurse spies on them through the keyhole and she recognizes the dead daughter of the household who died Only a few months previously, she goes to the parents and said, your daughter's still alive. So they burst in joyously, your daughters come back to life. But then she says, you've done it now. You shouldn't have done that. You've broken the deal I had with the underworld powers and therefore I've got to go back. And at that point she drops dead. So there is her corpse. They go to her tomb and they find, indeed she's not there, that the beer in the tomb is empty. This story takes on various different forms and was a very popular one much later by the 19th century Romantic writers of vampire fiction, because it has such obvious romantic possibilities.
- [32:41]
B
It's a sad story, John. Did these beliefs and the rituals that were used to counter them, did they all come to an end with the arrival of modernity and the Enlightenment?
- [32:52]
C
They didn't. They didn't. They reduced. They. And here I'm talking mainly about Europe. In some parts of Asia, they go on to this day. In Europe, they reduced. But I want to qualify that by saying, in any case, they tended to come and go. That's why I use the word epidemic in the title, because it is an epidemic effect. In some parts of medieval Europe, the belief rises. It's very, very strong. William of newbrough, the late 12th century English chronicler, says walking corpses are so common, it's boring to talk about them, there are so many of them. But then by about 20 or 30 years later, it's all disappeared, disappeared. So you can't ascribe the disappearance of these beliefs just to modernity. However, it's certainly true that from the mid 17th century onwards, intellectuals in Europe were increasingly sceptical about it. And after about 1750, no educated European probably would have admitted to taking these beliefs seriously, even if some of them perhaps did secretly. The Habsburg Empress Maria Theresa had a campaign against it in the 1750s and she issued an edict against it, so authorities tended to suppress it. Increasingly, there was a feeling, this is irrational, it's disgusting, and so forth. But it went on. It survived in parts of Russia west of the Urals, in Poland, Ukraine, into the Balkans, certainly up to the First World War in places quite strongly. The various traumas of the late 1910s, 1920s seem to have extinguished it in most areas. But there are traces going on, and the area where it actually still goes on today is southern Romania, the area of Wallachia to the west of Bucharest, near the Serbian border, where it is still alive today. And there is an extraordinary episode from 2004 where much of the action and the reported explanations afterwards were filmed so we can actually watch on video what people thought.
- [34:49]
B
It's extraordinary to think it's still happening. And finally, John, to wrap us up, I want to just take us back to where we started, really. What do you think it is about this idea of the dead coming back to life that's made it such a. Well, if not universal, such a recurring fear?
- [35:07]
C
I think it's a very powerful image, isn't it, the idea of the walking corpse. It has a very powerful effect on people's imagination, but I think I want to go a bit deeper into it than that and think of it as a mode of persecution which is activated by trauma. Of course, we know tragically, in so many human societies when people are scared, disrupted, and it can be physical disruption through invasions or war. It can be religious disruption, spiritual disruption through changes in a religious system imposed from above, or it can be medical disruption caused by epidemics. In all those situations, people in pre modern periods, pre medicine periods, are frightened, they're helpless, they don't know where to turn. And so it's very tempting to find scapegoats. And of course, we all know, tragically and including very recent times, that people have found scapegoats in minority groups, in ethnic groups, in religiously deviant groups, in sexually deviant groups. And that's been the source of, of some of the great traumas of the last couple of hundred years. What I want to say about the corpse killing is that it's actually a relatively innocuous version because the corpses are dead already. In some ways, the epigram of the book is, killing the dead is better than killing the living. And some people have said to me, how can you work on such a disgusting subject? Well, is mutilating corpses more disgusting than burning live people as witches? And what I would say is that this is the most harmless of all the outlets for the persecution mentality.
- [36:41]
B
That was John Blair speaking to me. Ellie Cawthorn. John is professor of Medieval History and Archaeology at Queen's College, University of London. His new book, which shares plenty more stories about the history of vampire belief, is called Killing the Vampire Epidemics From Mesopotamia to the New World.
- [37:10]
F
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