In the summer of 1592, high in the Moravian hills, the little town of Bennisch was gripped by fear. Back in February, the story goes, the mayor, Johann Kunze, had died after being kicked in the testicles by a horse. No sooner had he been buried, however, than the inhabitants began to experience strange and terrible things. Animals went mad, walls shook and gates flew open on their own. A little later, people reported being strangled in their sleep; Kunze’s widow was raped in her bed; the local church was defiled with blood. After five months, the townspeople could stand it no longer. Over the protests of the Lutheran pastor, they had Kunze’s corpse exhumed. To their horror they found that the body was not only incorrupt, but even responsive – clear proof that Kunze was one of the undead. There was only one thing to do. They hacked his body apart, threw the pieces onto a bonfire and tossed his still-smouldering ashes into the river. 

All this should be taken with a pinch of salt, of course. The only source we have – written years later by a rather eccentric philosopher – is less a piece of serious reportage than a work of schlock horror, riddled with motifs from local ghost stories. But the attack on Kunze’s corpse was no fantasy. Nor was it an isolated incident. A wave of corpse killing was then sweeping Moravia. Over the next 150 years there were hundreds of similar reports across the region, each more violent and gory than the last. Things got so bad, in fact, that in one year alone (1727–8), almost eighty bodies – including those of sixty children – were ‘executed’ in a single village.  

As the historian John Blair points out, corpse killing has been a feature of human society for millennia, and with good reason. We’re all frightened of dead bodies. We can’t help it. Until decay sets in, a dead person looks pretty much like they did in life. It is all too easy to believe that they could just ‘wake up’. And if they did, there’s no telling what they’d do. No surprise, then, that most cultures have been afraid of the ‘dangerous dead’. Many names have been used. In Albanian, walking corpses are known as shtriga, in Greek vrykólakoi, and in modern English ‘vampires’. But revenants have always been seen as uniquely threatening – and people have often ‘killed’ to keep them quiet. Indeed, the sheer
ubiquity of corpse killing is extraordinary. We find it in Bronze Age Siberia, Vedic India, Georgian England – even 21st-century Romania. 

What makes corpse killing so remarkable, however, is how much it ebbs and flows throughout history. It can be endemic, simmering away quietly beneath the surface for generations. Or it can give rise to epidemics that flare up seemingly out of nowhere, grip a particular region for a few years and then vanish again, sometimes for centuries. 

In this vast, sweeping new study, Blair sets out to provide the first proper survey of vampire epidemics from the ancient world to the present day. Drawing on a wealth of archaeological and documentary evidence, he traces their course, evolution and transmission across a dizzying range of cultures and peoples – and in doing so offers a compelling insight into the persistence of undead beliefs. 

Arguably the most striking feature of these epidemics is their sheer variety. As Blair rightly stresses, there is no ‘typical’ revenant. The only real constant is that, until the 19th century, they rarely, if ever, behave like Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Some stay in their graves and gnaw at their shrouds or smack their lips. Others are more mobile. At one time or another they have appeared as ‘flying demons, brutal thugs, antisocial relatives and neighbours, domineering grandmothers, cunning wise women, heretics, deadly seducers, rebellious teenagers and witches’. And while they only rarely feast on human blood, there is apparently no limit to the trouble they can cause.

Ideas about why vampires come back to life have also shifted over time. At least in Europe, two views predominated. One possibility was that a dead body could simply be ‘hijacked’. In early modern Epirus, for example, shepherds thought that vrykólakoi were corpses that the Devil inhabited to torment the living. The second, by contrast, held that the soul somehow got ‘stuck’. In some cases, this has been linked with a sense of unfulfilment in life. Those who die before their time, or without making amends for their crimes, just aren’t in a fit state to move on – and so are doomed to hang around as troublesome corpses. More intriguing, however, are those whose passage to the afterlife is somehow interrupted, usually through no fault of their own. As Blair points out, death has often been seen as a process, and a delicate one at that. A dead person needs to be carefully accompanied after their passing so that their soul can safely find its way to the hereafter. If that process is interrupted – through undue haste, or a cat jumping over the corpse, for example – the road is blocked, with disastrous consequences. 

It was usually easy enough to recognise the undead, of course. As the people of Bennisch found, an incorrupt, bloated or bloodstained body was a sure sign of something amiss. But knowing how to kill the dead was another matter. It didn’t always come down to simply driving a stake through the vampire’s heart – although that did happen pretty frequently. The simplest method was to rebury the corpse in a kneeling position. Other techniques were much gorier. In medieval and early modern Europe, suspected vampires often had their heads cut off and placed between their legs. The jawbone could be removed and displaced. Limbs could be tied together or nailed to the ground. And, if these weren’t enough, the body could then be burned or crushed beneath massive stones – just to make doubly sure that there would be no coming back. 

What unites vampire epidemics, however, is the reason they erupt in the first place. According to Blair, they tend to occur at times of acute social or political trauma. ‘By mirroring the distinctive anxieties of the societies that generated them’, they acted as ‘a therapeutic, largely innocuous outlet’ for otherwise dangerous ‘impulses of fear, hatred and paranoia’. A good illustration is provided by the ‘local’ epidemics in early medieval England. By c 640, the rapid spread of Christianity was upending society. Wise women – a relic of the pagan past – were increasingly marginalised; amid the unease about the new religion, a rash of violence was directed against female corpses. When plague broke out in England in 664, the ensuing fear of the dead ‘could well have intensified’ the corpse-killing epidemic.

Such an interpretation makes a good deal of sense. But it also begs some important questions. How do you define an epidemic, for example? Although for modern periods the sheer abundance of evidence probably negates the need for explanation, the same is not true for earlier centuries. Since the archaeological evidence is incomplete and occasionally ambiguous, Blair’s reluctance to lay out his criteria weakens confidence in some of his claims. England is once again a case in point. The author stresses that there were at least two corpse-killing epidemics in the seventh century. Yet for the period c 600–750, he identifies only eight sites where corpses may have been killed. Even if these represent just a small proportion of the true total, they hardly add up to an epidemic. 

And how seriously should we take the documentary evidence? Blair is generally judicious in evaluating his sources, but at times he is a little too eager to take them at face value. Consider, for example, Caesarius of Heisterbach’s Dialogus miraculorum. Written in the Rhineland in c 1223, this hagiographical work contains three stories about reanimated corpses in nearby dioceses. Now these obviously can’t be taken as evidence of actual events. If nothing else, the nearest ‘killed burials’ that have been discovered were hundreds of miles away, on the Baltic coast. But do they still reflect a sincere belief in the dangerous dead, as Blair thinks? It’s unclear. Hagiography was, after all, meant to foster wonderment. If a narrative was to do this, readers had to be ready to suspend their disbelief. Normally implausible phenomena – such as two dead villagers fighting in the grave – had to seem plausible. But this doesn’t mean that people expected to see such things happen in their everyday lives. If we don’t need to believe in vampires to spot the moral subtext of the Twilight series today, why should people have been any more naive in the past?  

But these are minor quibbles. Blair is to be congratulated on having produced a masterfully lucid history, filled with originality and excitement. Every page of Killing the Dead bursts with fresh insights and deliciously gory details. And, like all the best vampires, it’ll come back to haunt you long after you think you’re done.