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Killing the Dead: Vampire Epidemics from Mesopotamia to the New World
A riveting history of vampire panics across cultures and down through the millennia—and why killing the dead is better than killing the living
Killing the Dead provides the first in-depth, global account of one of the world’s most widespread yet misunderstood forms of mass hysteria—the vampire epidemic. In a spellbinding narrative, John Blair takes readers from ancient Mesopotamia to present-day Haiti to explore a macabre frontier of life and death where corpses are believed to wander or do harm from the grave, and where the vampire is a physical expression of society’s inexplicable terrors and anxieties.
In 1732, the British public opened their morning papers to read of lurid happenings in eastern Europe. Serbian villagers had dug up several corpses and had found them to be undecayed and bloated with blood. Recognizing the marks of vampirism, they mutilated and burned them. Centuries earlier, the English themselves engaged in the same behavior. In fact, vampire epidemics have flared up throughout history—in ancient Assyria, China, and Rome, medieval and early modern Europe, and the Americas. Blair blends the latest findings in archaeology, anthropology, and psychology with vampire lore from literature and popular culture to show how these episodes occur at traumatic moments in societies that upend all sense of security, and how the European vampire is just one species in a larger family of predatory supernatural entities that includes the female flying demons of Southeast Asia and the lustful yoginīs of India.
Richly illustrated, Killing the Dead provocatively argues that corpse-killing, far from being pathological or unhealthy, served as a therapeutic and largely harmless outlet for fear, hatred, and paranoia that would otherwise result in violence against marginalized groups and individuals.
Killing the Dead provides the first in-depth, global account of one of the world’s most widespread yet misunderstood forms of mass hysteria—the vampire epidemic. In a spellbinding narrative, John Blair takes readers from ancient Mesopotamia to present-day Haiti to explore a macabre frontier of life and death where corpses are believed to wander or do harm from the grave, and where the vampire is a physical expression of society’s inexplicable terrors and anxieties.
In 1732, the British public opened their morning papers to read of lurid happenings in eastern Europe. Serbian villagers had dug up several corpses and had found them to be undecayed and bloated with blood. Recognizing the marks of vampirism, they mutilated and burned them. Centuries earlier, the English themselves engaged in the same behavior. In fact, vampire epidemics have flared up throughout history—in ancient Assyria, China, and Rome, medieval and early modern Europe, and the Americas. Blair blends the latest findings in archaeology, anthropology, and psychology with vampire lore from literature and popular culture to show how these episodes occur at traumatic moments in societies that upend all sense of security, and how the European vampire is just one species in a larger family of predatory supernatural entities that includes the female flying demons of Southeast Asia and the lustful yoginīs of India.
Richly illustrated, Killing the Dead provocatively argues that corpse-killing, far from being pathological or unhealthy, served as a therapeutic and largely harmless outlet for fear, hatred, and paranoia that would otherwise result in violence against marginalized groups and individuals.
519 pages, Kindle Edition
Published September 9, 2025
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
November 1, 2025
A word of warning to start with. The subject matter of this book means that the author discusses people doing gruesome things to dead bodies, and this review will, to an extent, discuss that too. Look away now if you find that overly distasteful.
"In the 1010s, a Rhineland bishop wrote down a long list of superstitious errors, including two that concern us here. Adopting the voice of a probing confessor, Burchard of Worms asked:
‘Have you done what certain women, inspired by the devil, are in the habit of doing? When some infant dies unbaptized, they take the little one’s corpse, and put it in some secret place, and transfix its tiny body with a stake, saying that if they do not do this, the little child would rise up and would be able to injure many.… [And] when some woman needs to give birth but cannot, and dies in that misery during her fruitless labour, they transfix both mother and infant with a stake driven into the earth in the same grave.’
We all know the stories about staking vampires, and I had vaguely heard that corpse-killing was a real practice in pre-modern Europe, but this book provides a detailed survey. Although the subtitle refers to “vampire epidemics” the author highlights that historically, activities attributed to the undead extended well beyond bloodsucking, so in the text he generally uses terms like “the walking dead”, “the undead,” etc. Also, although he touches upon other parts of the world, the book is overwhelmingly focused on Europe. I suspect that’s because the bulk of the written and archaeological evidence is located in Europe.
Incidentally, the author doesn’t believe the undead were a historical reality. In this, my own views align with the author’s. He wants to understand what lay behind the beliefs and cultural practices around corpse-killing.
Something I was less convinced about was his assertion that beliefs around the undead were concentrated in northern Eurasia, where they co-existed “with a sense of permeable boundaries between the human, spirit, and animal worlds. These thought-patterns were not unique to the region (some of them also occur in Africa, for instance), but they are accessible through some helpful anthropology.” I can’t comment on the geographical extent of beliefs in the walking dead specifically, but it does seems to me that the idea of a permeable boundary between the human, spirit and animal worlds was historically pretty widespread and not limited to Eurasia. The author does concede that beliefs in the undead also exist(ed) in West Africa and pre-colonial Australia.
It seems there was a common belief that the walking dead had to have a physically intact corpse in order to get up and move about. They could therefore be counteracted by dismembering the corpse. As the author puts it, “a long procession of mutilated corpses weaves its way through this book.” Decapitation was perhaps the most common technique for dealing with the undead, along with removal of the lower jawbone. Severing of the feet, the breaking of leg bones, and the binding of bodies also feature, along with the famous stake through the heart, the surviving examples of which involved metal spear heads or spikes. In a group of cases found in Poland, female burials had sickles hooked around their throats. In the last resort the bodies of “the undead” were simply burned.
There seem to have been periodic eruptions of these practices, which the author links to crises, particularly periods of “spiritual” crisis, such as when pagan societies converted to Christianity, or during the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. He also discusses how the majority of “victims” were women, especially young women, and why this might have been the case. Further, he suggests that corpse-killing tended to happen in areas where there was little or no witch-killing. He makes the point that, where a society looks for scapegoats to reduce anger and resentment, then it’s probably better that they find those scapegoats amongst the already dead, rather than the living.
If I am being honest, I found this book a bit drier than I expected to, given the subject matter. At the same time it is strong in both information and analysis. Corpse-killing is a subject that has attracted far less attention than witch-killing. The author is to be commended for shining a light on a little known aspect of history.
"In the 1010s, a Rhineland bishop wrote down a long list of superstitious errors, including two that concern us here. Adopting the voice of a probing confessor, Burchard of Worms asked:
‘Have you done what certain women, inspired by the devil, are in the habit of doing? When some infant dies unbaptized, they take the little one’s corpse, and put it in some secret place, and transfix its tiny body with a stake, saying that if they do not do this, the little child would rise up and would be able to injure many.… [And] when some woman needs to give birth but cannot, and dies in that misery during her fruitless labour, they transfix both mother and infant with a stake driven into the earth in the same grave.’
We all know the stories about staking vampires, and I had vaguely heard that corpse-killing was a real practice in pre-modern Europe, but this book provides a detailed survey. Although the subtitle refers to “vampire epidemics” the author highlights that historically, activities attributed to the undead extended well beyond bloodsucking, so in the text he generally uses terms like “the walking dead”, “the undead,” etc. Also, although he touches upon other parts of the world, the book is overwhelmingly focused on Europe. I suspect that’s because the bulk of the written and archaeological evidence is located in Europe.
Incidentally, the author doesn’t believe the undead were a historical reality. In this, my own views align with the author’s. He wants to understand what lay behind the beliefs and cultural practices around corpse-killing.
Something I was less convinced about was his assertion that beliefs around the undead were concentrated in northern Eurasia, where they co-existed “with a sense of permeable boundaries between the human, spirit, and animal worlds. These thought-patterns were not unique to the region (some of them also occur in Africa, for instance), but they are accessible through some helpful anthropology.” I can’t comment on the geographical extent of beliefs in the walking dead specifically, but it does seems to me that the idea of a permeable boundary between the human, spirit and animal worlds was historically pretty widespread and not limited to Eurasia. The author does concede that beliefs in the undead also exist(ed) in West Africa and pre-colonial Australia.
It seems there was a common belief that the walking dead had to have a physically intact corpse in order to get up and move about. They could therefore be counteracted by dismembering the corpse. As the author puts it, “a long procession of mutilated corpses weaves its way through this book.” Decapitation was perhaps the most common technique for dealing with the undead, along with removal of the lower jawbone. Severing of the feet, the breaking of leg bones, and the binding of bodies also feature, along with the famous stake through the heart, the surviving examples of which involved metal spear heads or spikes. In a group of cases found in Poland, female burials had sickles hooked around their throats. In the last resort the bodies of “the undead” were simply burned.
There seem to have been periodic eruptions of these practices, which the author links to crises, particularly periods of “spiritual” crisis, such as when pagan societies converted to Christianity, or during the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. He also discusses how the majority of “victims” were women, especially young women, and why this might have been the case. Further, he suggests that corpse-killing tended to happen in areas where there was little or no witch-killing. He makes the point that, where a society looks for scapegoats to reduce anger and resentment, then it’s probably better that they find those scapegoats amongst the already dead, rather than the living.
If I am being honest, I found this book a bit drier than I expected to, given the subject matter. At the same time it is strong in both information and analysis. Corpse-killing is a subject that has attracted far less attention than witch-killing. The author is to be commended for shining a light on a little known aspect of history.
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October 14, 2025round 1540 Martin Luther received a letter from a pastor in rural Saxony, asking for advice on how to deal with the corpse of a recently deceased woman who was steadily eating herself in the grave and, consequently, causing everyone in the village to die. It was an instance of a hungry ‘shroud-chewing’ corpse, often feared as the source of disease in 16th-century Europe. The severe Protestant reformer had no patience with ungodly peasant beliefs and angrily told his secretary ‘they only keep dying because they are so superstitious’. Luther suggested the villagers be told to get a grip and ‘go to Church and ask God to forgive their sins’.
Luther’s stance marks the cusp of a new dispensation in Northern Europe on matters supernatural. He was trying to establish a rigid division between the living and the dead (his attack on the doctrine of Purgatory also undermined the Christian rationale for ghosts lingering on in an in-between state). But Luther was fighting millennia of widespread belief in corpses coming back from their graves and well-established rituals for re-killing the restless dead. In a contemporary culture suffused with vampires and zombies, it might seem that Luther did not entirely win this argument.
Read the rest of the review at https://www.historytoday.com/archive/...
Roger Luckhurst is Professor of Nineteenth-Century Studies at Birkbeck, University of London.
Luther’s stance marks the cusp of a new dispensation in Northern Europe on matters supernatural. He was trying to establish a rigid division between the living and the dead (his attack on the doctrine of Purgatory also undermined the Christian rationale for ghosts lingering on in an in-between state). But Luther was fighting millennia of widespread belief in corpses coming back from their graves and well-established rituals for re-killing the restless dead. In a contemporary culture suffused with vampires and zombies, it might seem that Luther did not entirely win this argument.
Read the rest of the review at https://www.historytoday.com/archive/...
Roger Luckhurst is Professor of Nineteenth-Century Studies at Birkbeck, University of London.
December 11, 2025
This was my favorite nonfiction read of the year!
If you're like me, you're looking at this review because you're standing there in the bookstore thinking, "Gosh, this looks really interesting, but it is really long and also, maybe that title is the publishing version of clickbait? Maybe it isn't really about cool stuff like vampires? Let me check Goodreads."
This book is definitely exactly what the title says. (Okay, so the actual word "vampires" is maybe a little bit clickbait. The author mostly uses the phrase "dangerous dead" to encompass a variety of beliefs, and only uses the words for vampires, zombies, etc, when he is discussing specific contexts.) If you are interested in actual times and places where people actually believe that the dead get up and walk around and/or prey upon the living, this book is extremely comprehensive in its overview.
So, is this book for you? I would recommend it if one or more of the following apply to you:
- You're a fiction reader who wants to know what real life source materials authors have been mining for ideas
- You're looking for something different. I've never read a book on quite this topic.
- You aren't daunted by a 500 page book that leans more academic than sensational. (Personally, I don't like nonfiction that is so sensationalized that it borders on fiction.)
- You enjoy unexpected anecdotes (um, someone in a real court case about theft casually mentioning that they're a werewolf who went to hell to steal back grain blossoms and thus prevent famine?) alongside analytical discussion of the soci0economic and cultural contexts for these events
I really wish I was in a college class teaching this because I would love to dive in and discuss the ideas presented in the book. Instead, I guess I'll just have to bully someone else into reading it and discussing it with me in gruesome detail.
If you're like me, you're looking at this review because you're standing there in the bookstore thinking, "Gosh, this looks really interesting, but it is really long and also, maybe that title is the publishing version of clickbait? Maybe it isn't really about cool stuff like vampires? Let me check Goodreads."
This book is definitely exactly what the title says. (Okay, so the actual word "vampires" is maybe a little bit clickbait. The author mostly uses the phrase "dangerous dead" to encompass a variety of beliefs, and only uses the words for vampires, zombies, etc, when he is discussing specific contexts.) If you are interested in actual times and places where people actually believe that the dead get up and walk around and/or prey upon the living, this book is extremely comprehensive in its overview.
So, is this book for you? I would recommend it if one or more of the following apply to you:
- You're a fiction reader who wants to know what real life source materials authors have been mining for ideas
- You're looking for something different. I've never read a book on quite this topic.
- You aren't daunted by a 500 page book that leans more academic than sensational. (Personally, I don't like nonfiction that is so sensationalized that it borders on fiction.)
- You enjoy unexpected anecdotes (um, someone in a real court case about theft casually mentioning that they're a werewolf who went to hell to steal back grain blossoms and thus prevent famine?) alongside analytical discussion of the soci0economic and cultural contexts for these events
I really wish I was in a college class teaching this because I would love to dive in and discuss the ideas presented in the book. Instead, I guess I'll just have to bully someone else into reading it and discussing it with me in gruesome detail.
December 8, 2025
This is a very detailed look at the fascinating topic of how and why people have 'killed the dead'. Despite the slightly misleading subtitle (presumably chosen for market appeal), Blair considers a broad range of cases where, in way or another, corpses have been thought to exercise a malign influence—spreading death & disease, visiting and distressing friends & family, and, yes, blood-sucking—that needed to be stopped. His thesis that young women were particular targets for corpse killing is compelling, and his idea that persecuting the dead is an overlooked outlet for fears that might otherwise have targeted the living is thought-provoking. A particular highlight is Blair's treatment of archaeology, especially medieval burial evidence (his academic forte), where he provides helpful and legible diagrams. I was less convinced by his emphasis on 'motifs', which sometimes leads him to insist upon the influence of one story/culture upon another in a distant time and distant place, relying on extremely speculative chains of transmission. Still, the parallels he highlights between practices in Anglo-Saxon England, high medieval contexts, early modern eastern and central Europe, 19th century America, etc, are intriguing—and it is to Blair's great credit that he attempts an explanation, even if some specialists of particular periods are unlikely to be persuaded. This book has its problems, and may be too singular in its focus at points. Overall, though, I am in awe of the huge amount of learning, reading, and ambition that went into it.
December 28, 2025
Humans never cease to amaze me. If you're a history buff strongly interested in anthropology - this one might be for you.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews