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John Blair, "Killing the Dead: Vampire Epidemics from Mesopotamia to the New World" (Princeton UP, 2025)
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Experian.
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Marshall Poe
Hello, everybody. This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form, and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Hello, and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very excited today to be speaking with Professor John Blair about his book, just published by Princeton University Press in 2025, titled Killing the Vampire Epidemics from Mesopotamia to the New World, Doing really what that suggests, taking us across loads of different places, loads of different times, to understand different beliefs around the dead that rise. Right. We might call them vampires. We're going to talk about what we call them. And of course, all of these different ideas and beliefs aren't identical from place to time. That's what makes it so interesting to compare them. But it turns out there is actually an interesting amount of similarity around what happens when people die. Do they die? Why should we be concerned about that and how this is manifested in different places and times? So we have a lot to discuss. It's, I think, going to be a very exciting conversation. John, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
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Professor John Blair
Thank you. It's very nice to be here.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Well, I'm very pleased to have you. Could you start us off by introducing yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write this book and how you've approached the topic, given how big it is?
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Professor John Blair
So, I'm a medieval historian. All my other work has been on medieval northern Europe. I was involved a few years ago in the editing of a text from 12th century Staffordshire which describes in great and graphic detail a case of walking corpses that were exhumed and killed. And this story grabbed my imagination. I started to look at folklore from other parts of Europe and was amazed to find how the same motifs crop up in different places and completely different times. Extraordinary parallels between the 11th century in Midland England and the 21st century in Romania. And I developed a fascination with the transmission of these ideas. How did this very weird belief move from one society to another and from one period to another? But it's only now, in retirement that I've really had the time to look at this properly and write a book which is actually completely outside my normal field.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
And I can understand that. Part of why you probably had to write Wait for Retirement is that there's a lot of times and places. Yes, of course, your specialism in medievalism, but it does, as you mentioned, go well beyond that. So how did you decide how to tackle it in terms of what times to cover, what places to go to?
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Professor John Blair
It quickly became clear to me that I needed to look at the whole world in some sort of detail. Obviously, I couldn't look at the whole world in very full detail, but I did look at standard books about the beliefs and folklore and spirit ideas of everywhere in the world. And I marked down those places where there appeared to be convincing evidence for belief in the activity of actual corpses after death. That's the main criterion. This is not a book about spirits or ghosts. It's a book about corpses that move around. And that's a belief that people have had at some places, but not others. At some times and not others. And the thing that struck me quickly as I worked across this global survey is how the beliefs seem to come and go. And I quickly realized they have a kind of epidemic quality, which means that you can't just say there are beliefs in walking corpses in this place. There Aren't in another. You have to look at it across time as well as space. Hmm.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
That's a really key insight here, as well as, of course, the focus of what we're talking about. It's not spirits, it's not ghosts. And if we're thinking across time as well as space, then that would suggest that one could sort of map out where these beliefs pop up to the sort of epidemic level. Is that something we can do?
- [05:37]
Professor John Blair
Well, of course, there we get an evidence problem because some parts of the world are much better documented in the past than others. I mean, we go between the extremes of ancient Mesopotamia, where we have written sources going back to the second millennium B.C. or, for example, parts of Siberia, where these beliefs are very interesting, where we have nothing before the 19th century. So it's difficult to draw a map that's worldwide and goes back a long way. But I did draw a map of beliefs over the last two or 300 years, and it was interesting to see that that did produce a very broad pattern. One can see that these beliefs kind of move around the Europe. There's what I rather, tongue in cheek, called the Vampire Corridor, going from northwestern Europe across through the Balkans, Russia, Turkey, into China, India, Indonesia, but not, for example, very much in southern Europe, not, apparently, in indigenous American societies, except for a few hints in the Mesoamerican cultures. So we can get a broad brush impression from this, from which it's then possible to drill down in certain places where there are either written sources or.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Archaeological sources, or in some cases, a combination of the.
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Professor John Blair
Both or a combination of both. Yes.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Well, let's do some of that drilling down then. What kinds of belief systems and social circumstances do. Do we see where there are really deep fears of the dangerous dead, of the corpses being potential problems?
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Professor John Blair
I think probably some sort of sense that corpses are uncanny, unsettling, is probably a human universal. I think everybody has that to some extent, but what everybody doesn't have is a clear idea that a corpse can potentially get up and start walking around and doing harm. Freud believed that the vampire belief was universal. It was hardwired. But I think it's very clear that it isn't. There is a predisposition to believe it in certain circumstances. And I think there are two broad categories of those circumstances. The first is a sense of a spirit world in which there are multiple spirit forces, life forces that can move around the kind of beliefs that are rather loosely associated with what we might call shamanism. And I think it's no accident that a lot of these Beliefs kind of track around the southern periphery of circumpolar shamanic beliefs. Because if you believe that there are dangerous, powerful forces that can move around and go into anything, then one thing they can go into potentially is a corpse. So that's one ingredient for beliefs in dangerous corpses. But another one is, I think, rather different in origin. Stimulated by fear, fear, misery, insecurity. What happens when there is some big disturbance in society as a political disturbance, military disturbance, religious change, or it may be disease. The kind of circumstances in which people look for scapegoats. And one potential kind of scapegoat is the dangerous corpse. And the corpse has a great advantage over a ghost. I mean, a ghost, you can't do anything about it, it comes and goes. But if you think that a corpse is being dangerous, then you can track it, you can identify it, you can attack it, you can imprison it, you can condemn it, you can execute it. In fact, all of the things that you can do to witches. And there's quite a lot of similarity between dangerous corpse beliefs and witch beliefs.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Hmm, we might get into that in a moment. But I want to talk more about these dangerous corpses. What are, for example, the various ways that someone might become a malevolent animated corpse?
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Professor John Blair
I think there are two main ways. One is to do with process. So a lot of beliefs are to do with uncompleted process, or something goes wrong during the dangerous crucial stage between death and burial. In many societies, death is viewed as a process, not a one moment event. So between the point of actual breath ceasing and the body being fully decayed, there are a number of stages and those stages have got to be gone through properly. Many societies have a wake where the body is watched, often watched very carefully. Now, an extreme example of that is recent rural Greece, where there's been excellent anthropological work. And in that society very recently, even perhaps in somewhere still today, the process of watching the corpse and making sure nothing untoward happens to it is absolutely crucial. And if, let's say a cat jumps over the corpse, that is the end. The dead person may have been very good in life, may be a very generous, good, charitable person. But if a cat jumps over the corpse, then they become a vampire. So that is entirely to do with process. But other reasons are to do with the kind of person they were in life. And one big category is young women who die unfulfilled. The female element is very important in this. I think people have missed this in the past. In many societies, the dangerous dead have been predominantly female. And the particularly high risk category is women who die between the ages of, let's say 15 and 22, before marriage, before childbirth, at a sub adolescent stage or just post adolescent stage where the uncanny forces associated with adolescence are still pent up inside them. And they die unfulfilled and resentful. So that's one category of people who may want to come back in their corpses. In other societies, it's bad people. People who've been wicked, cruel, or in particular, faithless, who've died leaving moral debts in this world which have not been paid back. Those are people who may be restless and unable to leave their corpses. They go on wandering around or exercising some sort of demonic power from their corpses. So there are a range of reasons. They depend very much on different societies and different kinds of socioeconomic and political and religious culture.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
I want to pick up on this young women aspect of it because they are, as you've mentioned, seen as often the most at risk of becoming dangerous dead. You also talk about how they're often seen as the group potentially most likely to be able to communicate with the dangerous dead. Is it for similar sorts of reasons of being in a liminal state?
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Professor John Blair
Yes, I mean, that relates more actually to witches. In, for example, the Salem witch panic in late 17th century New England, a lot of the people who claimed to have visitations from witches were young women. And after that, after they'd been attacked by the witches, of course, they were themselves uncanny people, even though they'd been victims because they'd absorbed some sort of supernatural power from these encounters. The other thing is poltergeist phenomena which are very closely associated with adolescent women. I think there's an idea in many cultures which has some sort of neurological basis that young women are often associated with particular states of mind. There's a very interesting book by the neurologist Suzanne Sullivan called the Sleeping Beauties, about recent psychosomatic episodes that have often involved young women. And I think the people in the past have recognized this effect and have attributed it as a supernatural significance.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
That's really interesting. And witches have come up a few times. So I would like to talk a bit about the extent to which we see overlaps in places that undergo witch hunts versus places that are focused on persecuting the dangerous dead. Does this happen in the same place or kind of specifically not?
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Professor John Blair
Well, there is some similarity between the witches and the corpses because they're both physical, they're both people either living or dead, and they're both capable of diabolic possession. A lot of the witchcraft Beliefs are to do with women selling themselves to the devil, being possessed by demons. And there is a strand in dangerous corpse beliefs which see the corpse as being occupied not by its previous personality in life, but by some sort of demon. So in that way, they are quite similar. And as I said, they also have this characteristic that they are physical, so they can be attacked. My impression is that on the whole, these are alternative rather than complementary kinds of victim. In other words, where you get corpse killing, you tend not to get witch killing. So the areas in late medieval and early modern Europe where you get outbreaks of corpse persecution are, on the whole, not the ones where you get witch persecution. There are one or two exceptions to that, like Moravia in the 18th century, where you do seem to get a very traumatic phase of witch persecution being replaced by a phase of corpse persecution. But it looks a bit as though it's the same sort of instinct, the same sort of dynamic. We're hopeless in the face of crisis, disease attacks. We must find a victim. And the victim might be a living woman who is believed to be possessed, or it might be a corpse that's believed to be possessed, who might, in.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Many places and times, also be a woman.
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Professor John Blair
Yes, exactly.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Interesting. Now, when we're talking about the dangerous dead, let's be clear. How dangerous are these corpses assumed to be? I mean, are they. Is it inevitable that any potentially living corpse is automatically dangerous? And by dangerous, do we mean they go around killing people?
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Professor John Blair
They're dangerous in two different ways. And I divide them into the active ones and the passive ones. The active ones are the ones who actually get out of their graves and walk around. Now, unlike the later Dracula story and tradition and the fiction that's based on that, we very rarely see them actually biting or sucking blood. There are very exceptional examples of that, which in fact happened to be what Dracula was based on by Bram Stoker. But generally speaking, we don't see them biting, sucking blood. We see them walking around, often pressing people at night. And this is where another neurological anomaly comes in. The night paralysis effect, the nightmare effect, which is a real mental condition. Many people experience it at some time in their lives where you appear to wake up, you can't move, you have a sensation, it's not a dream, it's real, but you have something sitting on you, pressing you. And if you perceive that to be a person who's died recently, well, of course, it's very natural to think that they're actually walking around in their body. So some of them do that kind of thing occasionally. They generally make a nuisance of themselves. They shout, they're accompanied by barking dogs. They call people who then die. They behave like kind of unruly outcasts from society a lot in Iceland, for example, like that and in the Icelandic sagas. But the other kind are the ones who just lie in their graves and spread some sort of malevolent force from their graves by a very obscure process. And there's possible early medieval cases of this. There are very well documented cases of it in Saxony in Germany in the Reformation period, in the mid to late 16th century, where it was believed that certain mainly female corpses would lie in their graves chewing their shrouds. And as they chewed their shrouds, plague would spread, particularly in their own families, their own villages or towns. More and more people would die unless the grave was opened and the corpse was beheaded. So those ones don't get out of their graves, but they still do a lot of harm. And it's worth adding to that that one of the latest and most extraordinary epidemics of corpse fear, which was actually in the United States, it was in New England in the late 18th and 19th centuries. It was believed that the inner organs of some corpses spread tuberculosis so that the corpses had to be dug up and the heart, liver and lungs taken out and burned. So there are various different ways in which they can exert their evil power. Some of them are actually evil in intention. Some of them were perfectly good people. But the effect is universally bad.
- [18:33]
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Professor John Blair
And Doug.
- [19:34]
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Professor John Blair
Uh, Limu is that guy with the binoculars watching us?
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- [19:53]
Professor John Blair
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Professor John Blair
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Okay, that's definitely helpful to understand the range of what bad can mean there. If we're thinking then about the kinds of people who could become these sorts of corpses you've mentioned earlier, the kind of gender specificity in some places, the sort of age of it. You also talk in the book about dangerous dead are likely to be people who died or lived badly, like had violent deaths or had bad lives. What sorts of ranges of things could we see that sort of meant that? And why didn't that seem to include suicide? That would seem like a cause, but it doesn't, isn't according to what you found.
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Professor John Blair
Yes, I think that the common factor is people who have left problems unresolved in this world. So they've sworn oaths and they've broken them. That is a situation that needs reconciling and resolving. They've been bad to their neighbors and they've died without making it up. Or they've been, let's say, judges who've been corrupt, or priests who've been untrue to their calling and led evil lives. These people have all died with something still to make up. And I think that the point about suicides is very interesting. There are very occasional cases, but generally speaking, suicides do not come back as dangerous corpses. And I think the explanation is that however wicked their action, they have completed their life process on their own terms. They've chosen to take their own lives. That has been an active decision, it's been a decisive decision, and that somehow brings about a kind of closure or completeness. It is puzzling, and I'm not sure that I fully understand it, but that is my best explanation for that.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
No, that's really interesting, especially because we would definitely think, at least for some of this period, that religion would have a very different perspective on suicide. And so, in fact, I would like to talk a little bit about religion. You mentioned the Reformation a moment ago. Do we see divergences between Protestant and Catholic ideas about the dangerous dead?
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Professor John Blair
Yes, the way in which these beliefs relate to the educated religious theology, it tends to be rather conflicted because, of course, in strict Christian theology, from St. Augustine onwards, this is simply not possible. People cannot walk around in their corpses. They've moved on. The corpse cannot be a place where the Spirit of the dead person can reside. So clergy have always had the problem of how to deal with this belief when it comes from below upwards, when terrified villagers say somebody's walking around. And it's been coped with in a range of ways, sometimes by clergy who've simply accepted it, assimilated to it, going against the strict rules of their calling. Or there is the let out that actually it's not the dead person moving around in the body, it's. It's the devil or a demon. That's one way in which a clergy can countenance this belief and approve of action taken against it. So when the Reformation comes in the 16th century, we start to see a division because Lutheranism straight away sets its face against it. And in fact, from the very beginning, Martin Luther himself, in one story, from his table talk, his informal conversation, which his followers wrote down, we have a story that Martin Luther was having lunch and his secretary brought a letter from a rural pastor who said that in my village there's a woman who died and she's eating herself in the grave and people are dying. What do I do about it? And Luther said, oh, that's just the devil's nonsense, one of the devil's tricks. It's not complete misunderstanding, it's not an illusion, but it's a delusion produced by the devil to turn people away from the right path. So Luther says, just tell the devil to get lost. Tell him we know, understand you, you can't fool us. Just go to church and pray to be protected against the devil's deceits. So for Luther, it can't actually happen. Corpses are not really doing this kind of thing. And Lutheran pastors repeatedly preach against this. Digging up corpses and beheading them because they're chewing their shrouds. They're not saying people are wrong, that they're having optical illusions when they see corpses chewing their shrouds. They're saying the devil is making it look as though they're chewing their shrouds. So that's the Lutheran position, which by about 1670 has moved in a more skeptical direction. It's all just a misunderstanding. It's a bit more complicated with the Catholic Church because with the Counter reformation in the 17th century, there is a very strong belief in witchcraft and demonic possession. And there are approved mainstream Catholic demonologists, particularly in the later 16th century, who say, yes, it is possible for the devil to occupy a corpse or for a damned soul to occupy a corpse. And so when often traumatized communities in, for example, parts of what's now the Czech Republic or Slovakia, where. Or Poland, where there had been an episode of Protestantism and now it's reverted to Catholicism. People who claim that corpses are walking around, the priests will sometimes say, yeah, that's right, this is the devil, or it's a demon, you've got to deal with it. And this goes on well into the 18th century, right up to the Enlightenment. And in fact, it's only finally in the 1750s when the Empress Maria Theresa, who's a proponent of the Enlightenment rationality, sets her face against this and issues a decree forbidding it in all her dominions. So it takes longer for the idea to be completely marginalized by the Catholic Church. But essentially, after about 1750, neither Lutherans nor Catholics are taking the idea seriously at an educated level.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, we'll talk about what's sort of happening around that time, I think probably a bit later, but going back into sort of theological discourse, I suppose, how do they deal with the fact that by some definitions, one could potentially count Jesus as a member of the dangerous dead? I mean, Corpse Rises does stuff, or was that not a link that was made?
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Professor John Blair
I don't think anybody ever identified Jesus as one of the dangerous dead. And of course, the theology of the resurrection is quite complex and it's not clear that it's actually his body, as in life, even though it's portrays, it betrays some of the signs of the crucifixion and so forth. On the other hand, it can move around in strange ways. It's a special, miraculous kind of body. But I think the resurrection story and Christian preaching may have fed into dangerous dead beliefs in the later Roman Empire. And in particular the scenario where, you know, someone's buried in a tomb, you go to the tomb, you find they're not there, therefore they must be walking around. And this of course, is what we get in the resurrection story, that the Mary's go to the tomb, the stone's been rolled back, Jesus's body is not there because he's risen. There are a couple of second and third century stories, one of which is actually a farce. It's a comedy from a papyrus found in Egypt about a man whose wife has died. He goes to the tomb and it's exactly the same story. The stone's been moved, she's not there. In fact, what's happened is that she'd just been in a trance, she'd woken up and she'd been abducted by pirates. But then there's another story, the story of Filinian, which is told by an early 2nd century Eastern Roman writer of a dead woman who comes back and forms a loving relationship with a young man. But it turns out that actually she's dead and they discover it by going to her tomb and finding she's not there. And I think it may be that some of these stories have been informed by hearing some of the earliest Christian preachers around the shores of the eastern Mediterranean.
- [28:21]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
That's really interesting. All right, I'm not going to go further down the religious theological rabbit hole as much as I probably could for a while. Instead, I wonder if we can talk about what makes these sorts of beliefs quieter or whipped up. I mean, you were speaking right at the beginning of our conversation that we see them kind of peak and trough at different points. So for example, in the book, there's spikes in ICELAND around sort of 9,30ish, 7th century England seems to have a spike. So what sorts of factors should we understand kind of make the beliefs go quiet or peak?
- [28:57]
Professor John Blair
So I think that there has to be an inherent propensity. In other words, it's got to be a society in which there's a common belief pattern in which this kind of thing is not completely off the wall crazy. You know, it's got to be possible for people to take the idea seriously, but maybe at a very muted level. What then whips it up to epidemic proportions tends to be some crisis. And I tried to find crises, but of course the trouble is every society has its crises. So it wasn't always possible to say firmly this is the reason. In a number of cases, though, I think it was fairly clear. For example, in 7th century northwest Europe, there's a combination of rapid religious change as Christianity very quickly takes over from polytheistic paganism. And also there is bubonic plague, which is hitting northwestern Europe, including England, including in the 660s. That may be the crisis. In that case. In 11th and 12th century Northwestern Europe, there's a whole range of things. Massive social change, rapid urbanization, the whole process of changing power relations and the exertion of military power that gets labeled feudalism. All of that produces massive instability. And I think that may have stimulated that one. And then in the 16th century, it's the Reformation combined with plague. It doesn't always happen. A good counter example is England in the 14th century where bubonic plague comes. There is no sign that dangerous dead beliefs are produced by it at all, though they existed in England centuries earlier. On the other hand, in Greece and the Balkans, it looks as though the 1340s plague did produce this effect. So I think it depends very much on whether there's a propensity there already, whether the society has alternative means of coping with insecurity, fear and grief. For example, in the 14th century English case, there was the developing idea of purgatory, chantries, masses for the dead, which maybe fulfill the same function. So there has to be some kind of crisis. Once it gets going, the thing becomes self perpetuating. It's been shown by anthropologists working on extreme kinds of rituals that there is a sort of confirmation effect. For example, a recent anthropologist working on the practice of walking barefoot on hot coals, which many societies do. It sounds unpleasant, dangerous, but it's very important because once you've done it, you have a sense of achievement. And also the more you do it, the harder it becomes to think that doing it is a crazy activity. You've invested in it. So the same with corpse killing. It's a violent, extreme, unpleasant process. You open a grave, you find a half decayed corpse, you start hacking it around, you cut open the rib cage, you take out the heart, you burn it, you behead the corpse, you turn it over, you do these very horrible things. You don't want to believe that you've done that for absolutely no reason at all. So once the ball gets rolling, it snowballs. It tends to get more and more marked, more and more extreme, up to a climax point, after which, over a few years or decades, it gradually fades away again, very much like an epidemic disease, in fact, I think, is the mechanism here. And so we see these things rising and falling. It must have happened throughout human history. But of course, it's only in certain more recent periods of history that we have enough evidence to document the chronology of this at all. Precisely.
- [32:45]
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- [33:13]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Hmm, yeah, that's really interesting to think about, the sort of rise and fall of it. But in fact, it's the hacking of corpses that I wonder if we can go to next, because that is, as you've suggested, a very violent, very sort of invested activity to undertake and therefore one that we would think you would be able to look at evidence for later on. So what can archaeologists look for? To think about whether or not the tomb that they're investigating or the court, the skeleton that they've found might have been an instance of dangerous dead.
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Professor John Blair
Well, one complexity there is. Of course, there are other reasons for mutilating corpses. For example, you find a corpse that's been beheaded, it might be it's being beheaded posthumously because the corpse is thought to be moving around. Though, of course, it could also be that the person was executed by beheading, throwing stones on a body or putting it upside down. Those might be just shaming rituals rather than because you think the corpse is moving around. I think that if you get a combination of specific actions, if you have beheading, let us say, combined with staking or removal of the heart, combined with attacking, amputating or binding the legs and feet, you start to get a more persuasive case. The most convincing cases of all are where there's evidence that the mutilation was not done at the initial burial, but was done sometime afterwards. In other words, the person's buried normally, but then they're believed to be causing trouble. So a few weeks or months later, the grave is opened and the body is mutilated. And you can sometimes identify that from the way in which the mutilation happens. A freshly dead corpse, if you're going to mutilate it, you've got to do it by cutting or chopping. But if a corpse has been lying in the grave for a few weeks or a small number of months, so that the muscles have decayed, you can perhaps just pull it apart. So if you have a corpse where, for example, as of some of the English ones, the head has been pulled off and then the cranium and the jawbone have been pulled apart and thrown back in different parts of the grave. And that's been done at a point where it can be done just by pulling, not by chopping. And therefore there are no chop marks on the bones, that then becomes a convincing case. Particularly convincing are attacks on the heart, because there aren't usually other reasons for doing that. So if the heart is staked, well, normally, of course, if a wooden stake is driven through the heart in a normal archaeological situation, you probably won't see that because the stake would have been decayed, you might just occasionally have wooden preservation. Or it might be that an iron stake has been driven through the heart, which will survive. Or the driving of iron nails into the joints of the elbows, shoulders, neck, arms, legs. There are late Roman examples of that. Difficult to see other reasons for doing that, or opening the whole left hand side of the rib cage and cutting out the heart completely. Again, it's difficult to find other reasons for doing that. And these practices relate precisely to what is described in the texts for context where we have those. So if we take all this evidence critically, systematically, we can build up criteria for recognizing posthumous corpse killing with a fair degree of probability.
- [36:38]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
And for listeners that want more, I will point you to the chapter in the book that literally goes through with diagrams exactly what these things are to look for. That was definitely one of the fascinating bits of detail included. But if we're thinking then about kind of putting different pieces together in order to come up with some sort of like list or recognisable kind of what are we looking for type things, can we do the same sort of thing for the idea of the vampire? If we move sort of more into the medieval, maybe even early modern period, Is there a shared European idea of the vampire? If we go through different places, can we kind of make that kind of list of shared characteristics?
- [37:17]
Professor John Blair
Well, I think at this point I need to say something about terminology, because it's very important here. The root word lying behind vampire is a proto Turkic word probably, which appears to have meant something that sucks. It means blood sucking demon, probably. And that word is coming into Europe from the Black Sea, Caucasus region, from Turkic speaking regions seems to be coming westwards. Not at all clear when, but possibly at quite a late date. It may be no earlier than the 17th century. And it's very important here to say that the word vampire does not occur in any European context before the 1720s. You get Aupir, aubier, versions meaning various things, often meaning spirits rather than corpses. The word vampire applied to a biting, blood sucking corpse only appears in the early 18th century. And that is in a context in the Balkans where European beliefs in mobile corpses, dangerous corpses, are apparently fusing with this Turkic Caucasian idea of something that bites or sucks blood. Generally speaking, the European dangerous dead do not suck blood. They don't bite. They're dangerous in other ways. And it's this particular fusion, which is happening in the 1720s, 30s, that creates the template for what has been ever since in fiction, the European vampire. So that actually comes at quite a late date.
- [38:56]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, it does come at quite a late date. Is this also when we see the idea of vampires being more frequently thought of as being men than women? Because we were talking a lot about women before. Is this when that switches?
- [39:09]
Professor John Blair
No, that change does seem to happen in Europe considerably earlier. And I think that's got to do with religious change, the consolidation of a male Christian priesthood across Europe by the end of the first beginning of the second millennium A.D. the downgrading and disappearance of the traditional wise women, who were probably very important in early medieval European cultures. Powerful women, powerful medical practitioners, magic practitioners, foreseers of the future, these people are gradually marginalized. And also the development of military power, seigneurial power, castle building, all these things in the 11th, 12th centuries is making it much more a man's world. And in fact, the stories that are told in England and also in Iceland are almost entirely male. Not quite, but almost entirely are the stories told in England in the 11th and 12th centuries. There's a big epidemic. In fact, a writer in England in the 1190s says, Nowadays there are so many walking corpses, it's boring to talk about them. They're all over the place. And these are all male at that time. So the shift from female to male is happening quite a bit earlier. But in some contexts, the female element hangs on. So as I said, in Lutheran Germany, they're mainly female. In some contexts, the epidemics start with females and then move on to males.
- [40:36]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Okay, so it's not entirely fixed, but there is definitely a switch that can be seen. Of course, the other big switch around this sort of time is going from the idea of the dangerous dead being really terrifying. Right. Being something that communities were really worried about and willing to undertake pretty extreme action to try and guard against, to being something that shows up in stories that are very much considered fictional and even sort of frivolous and silly. That's a big change. How and why does that happen?
- [41:11]
Professor John Blair
Yes, so I think it's important here to say that it's not all or nothing. I mean, there are much earlier periods when it's possible for ideas developed even by writers of fiction, certainly by writers of philosophy and theology, to move from an educated, literate world to an oral, vernacular world. It's not a one way process. It's not just that people write down oral stories, it can go the other way. And there are examples in the 17th century of what appeared to be, in one case, a pamphlet, popular sensational pamphlet, that's just entertainment from a late 16th century Moravia. And in another case, an ethnographic work, in fact was originally about West Africa, in fact, believe it or not, actually getting cycled back into popular belief. So people start really believing things that were written either as fiction or as ethnographic curiosities. However, there is, over time, gradually, between, let us say, the early 17th and late 18th centuries, there is a broad trajectory as eventually the Enlightenment takes hold, education increases, and I suppose this is the Big change. The educated take these ideas less and less seriously. So, as I was saying, in 1600, Catholic highly educated theologians and demonologists could take the idea seriously. By 1700, it was being ridiculed in Rome. Some provincial clergy were still taking it seriously. By 1750, it's really been abandoned by anybody with any pretentions to education. So that means that is a big change. The Enlightenment sets its face against it. There is a big boundary that develops in the course of the 18th century, not so much the Protestant Catholic frontier as the Catholic Protestant frontier world on the one hand, and the Greek and Russian Orthodox world on the other hand, because these ideas survived much more in the Orthodox world, where clergy were less inclined to suppress them and more inclined to validate them. So I'll come on to that in a moment, because what happens in Orthodox Eastern Europe is very interesting, but in Western Europe, it's really the Serbian events of the 1720s and 30s, which were investigated and debunked by officials sent by the Habsburg administration, medical specialists who were able to show that these corpses were incorrupt for purely natural reasons. This then got incorporated in a series of philosophical and medical pamphlets which became very widely read across Europe, got into the popular press, for example, in England, it was in the Gentleman's Magazine in March 1732. But it was there not as something that really was a real supernatural case, but a sort of exotic belief. And from that point on, it gets absorbed into rhetoric in Western Europe as a metaphor, really, the vampire as a symbol for exploitative, extractive governments, class conflict, and then simply in entertaining fiction. Whereas in the Orthodox world, it's very different and goes on being taken much more seriously.
- [44:40]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Do you want to tell us more about that?
- [44:41]
Professor John Blair
Yes. In Greece, the clergy, right up to modern times, have maintained the idea that the quiet and final passage of the soul to heaven is a process that goes alongside the dissolution of the body. And in rural Greece, where the body tends to be exhumed after, let's say, 10 or 15 years and the bones put in an ossuary, it's very important that the bones are clean and white. If the bones are nice and clean, all the flesh is gone. That means that the person has gone on, they've passed away quietly to the next world. If there's any flesh left, though, that's a very bad sign. And it means that in some sense, their personality may be hanging around. And there was also the strange idea that the excommunicate couldn't decay. So in a way, the state of being undecayed an undecayed corpse is something that you get either with the very holy, the saints, or with the very unholy, the excommunicates or the vampires. So in the Orthodox world, the belief survives, especially among rural clergy, even when theologians finally abandon it. And it's in Orthodox Romania, especially the area of southern Romania near the Serbian border, that these beliefs have survived up to the present day. And Even in the 21st century, there have been some extraordinary and completely seriously intended episodes of corpse killing.
- [46:18]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, so that was actually where I wanted to probably end our discussion. Is it the case now where corpse killing is just sort of only fictional or a thing of the past? I mean, obviously, with those examples, it's not right.
- [46:30]
Professor John Blair
Yes. And the most recent case known to me was from 2019. So only six years ago, in southern Romania, where a woman's corpse was dug up and staked through the heart while the parish priest recited liturgy. The bishop found out and suspended the priest and it led to a lawsuit which was only settled a few months ago. So it goes on right up till now. The most extraordinary case, though, is from 2004, where a small village in the same part of Romania, a farmer died and he fell under his horse while he was drunk. He was buried, but then his niece complained that he was coming back at night and pressing down on her, and so a neighbour thought he had to take action. So he drank a lot of plum brandy first. Then he went to the cemetery at night. He broke open the tomb and there was the body undecayed and there was blood on the mouth. And this whole episode was reported to the police and a journalist followed the police when they came to the cemetery and the perpetrator actually told his own account in front of a video camera, so one could not have more direct evidence. We have a video recording of him telling his own story about what he did. And he describes how he cut the body open with a scythe, he took out the heart, he took it to a crossroads, burnt it, mixed the ashes with tea and gave the ashes to the victim, who immediately recovered. And it's extraordinary how this is almost identical to the story from 11th century Staffordshire, which first aroused my interest. And what is remarkable about this is how a lot of the villagers sympathised with him, disapproved of bringing in the police. They said, what have we done wrong? It's better for the living. It's better for the dead. The living have got to be properly alive. The dead have got to be properly dead. We have done no harm, We've just established a proper status quo for everybody. The old traditions know best what to do. I thought it's a very remarkable illustration of how powerful and how resilient these beliefs can still be.
- [48:30]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, that's a really good example of that. And the beliefs are certainly powerful and resilient, not just in terms necessarily of practices like that, but they're certainly pretty resilient in fiction. So what do you think has made the fictional idea of the vampire also really consistent and popular and strong?
- [48:48]
Professor John Blair
I think one thing is that Bram Stoker created a character of enormous power and dramatic force in Dracula. Count Dracula is very unlike any vampires in which people have actually believed. But he's of course, an amazingly dynamic figure really. Dracula has dominated the the whole vampire fiction genre ever since the 1890s. Why do people find it compelling? Well, I suppose there are two reasons. The supernatural always has a hold over people's imagination and also what happens after death. I think that it will always be something that people wonder about that is of interest to people. So ghosts and spirits hold people's attention, but then also the physicality of a corpse holds people's attention. And the fact that whereas you can't do anything about a ghost, a walking corpse is a monster you can attack. So there's a drama in the narrative of how you fight back. As in Dracula, as in subsequent vampire literature, living humans are not powerless. They can track the corpse and then they can destroy it. So I think it's the combination of the excitement, the grip on the imagination of ideas about death and after death with the drama of a narrative of hunting and suppressing a monster.
- [50:12]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Well, it's certainly fascinating today just as much as it was in many other places and times, as you've told us about here, and obviously have more detail in the book. So I suppose my only final question is has anything else captured your imagination for a next few retirement project? I don't know. You're going to go build a castle or write a book about something else?
- [50:32]
Professor John Blair
No, I shall now go back to my long standing interests in medieval settlement, landscape and buildings and material culture, which is what I've always worked on. I feel now I've got vampires out of my system, I won't be dressed again. So my next book will be on medieval building culture in Northwest Europe.
- [50:49]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Well, while you work on that, listeners can read the book we've been discussing titled Killing the Dead. Who Vampire Epidemics from Mesopotamia to the New World, published by Princeton University Press in 2025. John, thank you so much for joining me. On the podcast.
- [51:03]
Professor John Blair
Been a great pleasure to be here. Thank you.