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Vampire Epidemics Explained

• Michele McAloon • Season 4 • Episode 144

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Have you ever read Dracula??? child's play compared to John Blair's Killing the  Dead; Vampire Epidemics from Mesopotamia to the New World.

A corpse that won’t stay put tells you as much about the living as it does about the dead. We sit down with Oxford’s Professor John Blair to chart how vampire epidemics rise when communities are shaken by disease, war, or rapid change—and why the freshly buried become suspects when fear demands a target. From cuneiform-era hints of walking corpses to the 1720s Habsburg–Ottoman frontier where exhumations spread like wildfire, we follow the ideas that fused Central European “dangerous dead” with bloodsucking demons from the Caucasus and Black Sea, eventually crystallizing into the vampire that haunts Western imagination.

Together we draw clear lines between ghosts, zombies, and walking corpses and explore cultures that treat death as a long passage rather than a moment. Greek funerary customs—wakes, ossuaries, inspection of clean white bones—frame a pragmatic logic: when decay stalls, ritual steps in. We examine gendered patterns that mark young women as prime “restless” candidates, echoing deep folklore about female power and unfinished lives. Then we head into the ground with a practical guide to reading graves: decapitation with bound legs, bodies flipped face down, hearts pierced or removed, jaws separated to stop biting and curses. Archaeology becomes a detective story, not a horror script.

We also connect neurology and narrative through sleep paralysis, including intense Hmong cases in the United States where trauma and disrupted belief systems turned night terrors deadly. Finally, we trace how the press and literature—Voltaire’s metaphors, Le Fanu’s Carmilla, and Stoker’s Dracula—reshaped scattered practices into a single, seductive archetype. If you’re curious about how societies manage grief, channel anxiety, and transform fear into ritual, this conversation opens a doorway from folklore to forensic clues and back again.

Subscribe, share with a friend who loves history or horror, and leave a quick review to help others find the show. What idea about vampires will you rethink after listening?

Michele McAloon:

You're listening Crossword, where cultural clues lead to the truth of the word. And my name is Michele McALoon. A lot of people ask me why I do a podcast, a nonfiction book podcast, why I like to talk to authors. And today, this show is exactly why I do this. I am talking to Dr. John Blair. He is a very fine gentleman from Oxford University who has written a brilliant book on the undead. So if you ask me why I do this, this is why I do it, because it makes a world larger and much more interesting. I hope you're not too scared. If you would be so kind to give me a good rating and happy listening, you can find out more about me on bookclues.com. Happy Halloween Vampire Epidemics from Mesopotamia to the New World by Professor John Blair, and he is coming to us from Oxford University. He is so talented, and he brings a lot of diverse talents to the subject of the undead, the vampires. Welcome, Professor Blair. It's very nice to be here. It's a couple days before, as we say in the Catholic Church, All Souls Day, or notoriously Halloween on the 31st. And it's about vampire epidemics and why vampires? What's the fascination with vampires for you?

Professor John Blair:

I became interested in it in a rather accidental way when long ago I was one of the general editors of the series Oxford Medieval Texts. And we were seeing through the press Robert Bartlett's edition of the miracles of St. Maudwenner of Burton on Trent, which contains a spectacular story of two peasants who die, and after they're buried, they come back, they walk around with their coffins, and eventually people dig them up and find that they are incorrupt and there's blood on their mouths, and so they cut off their heads and cut their hearts out. And while I was reading the proofs of this, I happened to be sitting in a library, and I was browsing idly on the shelves, and I found a book about Eastern European folklore, and I read an article about Romania and was just amazed to discover exactly the same stories turning up there in 19th and 20th century rural Romania. And I thought, this is so extraordinary. There must be some deep connection in these motifs. So what can it be? And then I discovered that nobody really had properly examined the transmission of these ideas on a worldwide or even really on a European scale. So I thought, one day I'm going to do that. So I saved that up for retirement.

Michele McAloon:

Oh, that's great. I lived in Moldova and I heard a lot of these stories, believe it or not. They had the Turkish, and you mentioned them in your book, the Gaga Ouz. There's kind of a folklore around the undead, around corpse killing. You don't really get into your book, but the Roma, the gypsy tradition that come into it. But I did hear several of these tales while I was living in Moldova.

Professor John Blair:

Yes, and that's a very interesting part of the world because different traditions seem to meet there. It's a bit unfortunate that it was particularly Transylvania that Bram Stoker fastened on when he was writing Dracula. He picked up a group of stories that are certainly representative of that part of Europe in the last 200 years, but not very representative of beliefs in the dangerous dead more generally. And I think what you're probably finding in Moldova is this same fusion between, on the one hand, the idea of the corpse that gets up out of its grave, that walks around, or that exerts some lethal power from its grave. That's coming out of Central Europe. But on the other hand, there are ideas coming into the Balkans from further east, from the Black Sea area, probably the Caucasus, which are much more to do with bloodsucking, blood-sucking demons. That's where the very name Upia, which eventually comes vampire, comes from. And these ideas seem to fuse in the Balkans in around 1700. And it was that fusion which the great Western European interest in vampires picked up from the 1720s onwards. Now it's interesting that in that area, those beliefs have gone on, partly because it's an Orthodox area, and the Orthodox Church set its foot, its face much less against these beliefs than the Catholic or the Protestant churches have done, partly because they've survived in very rural societies without all the much contact from the outside world. And so, yes, in Moldova you would indeed hear these stories. If you were to go further south and go into Valekia, near the Serbian border, you would find communities who are actually still digging up corpses and mutilating them to this day. They're not simply talking about it, they're actually doing it.

Michele McAloon:

Wow, let's start with sort of at the very beginning. What who are the dangerous dead, as you refer to them as the dangerous dead? Because you you really make a point in your book of showing that our understanding of vampire, of vampirism, really comes from that Brahm Stoker in the late, really 18th, 19th century. But the undead have been with us for a long time, or our understanding of the undead. Can you explain that to us?

Professor John Blair:

Yes, I think that the propensity to think that corpses are doing harm is not a universal in humanity. Freud thought it was. Freud thought that the vampire idea was suppressed hatred of one's dead relatives, very Freudian sort of idea, but it doesn't work because there are many societies across the world over many hundreds of years don't have this belief at all. On the other hand, I think probably it's a constant in all human societies that there's something obviously frightening about death, worrying, unsettling about death. There's something about unsettling about corpses. You know, what happens to them at the point of death? Is it actually a single point, or is it a process? Is it possible that some kind of life survives in the corpse? These kinds of ideas probably anybody might instinctively come to quite readily. And I think it's certain circumstances, independently at different times and places, that have caused people to have these kinds of ideas. And I think, first of all, you need certain spiritual and magical and religious ideas in the background, ideas to do with life forces, the capacity of spiritual forces to move around, to hang around, not for the souls of dead people not just to move on to the next world, but to hang around. You've got to have some conception of that possibility. You've also, though, I think, got to have some particular trauma which tends to activate it. I call the book Vampire Epidemics, and I think epidemics is how it does work. It's like epidemics of disease, or even more, like epidemics of persecution of other groups, like, for example, heretics or witches. It's a form of persecution, really, but it's persecution directed against the dead. Well, why do people persecute? Usually it's because of a sort of paranoic fear that's directed against some group who can be blamed for mysterious misfortunes. You know, that it may be that there's been some fundamental change in the belief system, some political change. Maybe it's disease. People are helpless in the face of disease in pre-modern societies. They've got to blame somebody. So you might be blaming, let's say, some ethnic group among you, you might be blaming people who think you're witches, or you might be blaming corpses. I think it's a variant on that pattern. It comes and goes. And so the evidence I found, which of course is very partial because not all parts of the world are as well documented as others, shows that as far back as you go, I mean, in ancient Mesopotamia on cunei-form tablets, you find from the 7th century BC some references suggesting belief in walking corpses. Then it comes up again in the late Roman Empire, it comes up in China at the same sort of date, and then at various times in Europe. So I think it's very widespread. It comes and goes. It's best conceived as rising and falling, like other kinds of epidemic.

Michele McAloon:

Very really, I mean, it's just fascinating. It's it really is tied to our culture, it's tied to our humanity. One thing that you really point out is that the Walking Dead are not, they're not witches, they're not ghosts. These are the Walking Dead are people that have died, right? And then they go in and they try to kill the corpse, or they think that corpse has been reanimated for whatever reason, and the people feel a need to go and kill that corpse, correct? That's right.

Professor John Blair:

Yeah, exactly.

Michele McAloon:

Okay. I do have to ask you a quick question. You know all the zombie movies that have come up in the last do you think that's kind of a manifestation of this in a weird way, a modern manifestation of it?

Professor John Blair:

Well, I think the the interesting thing there is that these images, these ideas still have a great hold on people's imagination, even though actually in modern Western societies, you know, people don't believe this. I mean, there'd be very, very few people, I think, in Western societies nowadays, you know, except in certain pockets, literally believe that corpses start getting out of their graves and walking around. The vampire movies, I mean, I should say that zombies are a particular variant, which are actually confined to Haiti and are, I mean, the zombie is a West African idea that's transported to the Caribbean, and it's a rather peculiar variant. A person who actually has not really died. They've been poisoned by a magician, and then they're resurrected, become a sort of living dead slave. Peculiar variant. What people call zombies usually are actually what in the 18th and 19th centuries people call vampires, and people had different names for earlier. We're talking about walking corpses. I think the thing that perhaps has a hold on people's imagination is on the one hand, they're spiritual. I mean, they're magical, they're supernatural. They're to do with ideas about, you know, what happens after death, is a survival after death, what form might it take? And in that respect, they're like ghosts. But unlike ghosts, they're material. So ghosts can, they just vanish away. You can't do anything with them. A ghost appears, it disappears, nothing you can do to it. Whereas a walking corpse or any other kind of dangerous corpse is a physical thing, and in that respect, it resembles a witch. So an animated corpse is like a witch in that it's a body. You can track it, you can accuse it, you can arrest it, you can try it, torture it, but you can kill it, you can execute it, you can destroy it. I think it fuses that idea of life and death, the hereafter, the supernatural, with the thrill of hunting a monster. You know, here is a villainous monster that's got to be hunted down. I think that that perhaps is what gives the idea of the vampire such an abiding hold on modern people's imagination.

Michele McAloon:

Does it also have to do with our understanding of death and our our our human interaction with death and how we understand it and how we as uh as individually, as a culture, as society, as family? I mean, and because in the West, we don't continence death very well. And the rest of the world, I think, up until the West, has seen death as more of a process where we seen it see it as a final curtain.

Professor John Blair:

Yeah, absolutely. I think that the whole idea of digging up and mutilating corpses is very repugnant to most people in developed Western societies, which is why I think people haven't studied it. You know, people have studied witches. I mean, since the great work of people l like Keith Thomas in the middle of the 20th century and Hugh Trevor Roper, people have taken the study of witchcraft beliefs seriously. It's a very sophisticated historiography on that. There isn't on this, because it has seemed to people to be particularly revolting, which is actually very strange when you think about it, because what is more revolting? Digging up a corpse and mutilating it, or burning somebody alive because you think they're a witch. You know, it's it's actually, in some ways, it's a it's a very innocuous form of persecution. But I think people react against it because we are not used to interacting with the dead. You know, the dead are taken away by undertakers, we never see them. But as you say, in many societies, I think death is seen as a process, it's a process that's got to be gone through correctly. And in particular, societies like Greece, where the wake is so important, the person dies, but that's not the end, it's just the beginning of the process of death. And so you have to have the wake that's performed correctly. And the extreme form of this in some rural Greek communities, which have been brilliantly studied by the anthropologist Juliet de Boulay, the body is laid out at the wake, people watch it. If there's an accident, and in particular, the particularly bad accident is if a cat jumps over the body. Right. It doesn't matter how bad the person was, there may have been a saint in life, they may have been the best person ever. If a cat jumps over the body, they've become a vampire. They've got to be dealt with. Which isn't this is an extreme form of the intense emphasis on correct process. And actually, a lot of beliefs in restless corpses worldwide have been because it's been thought that the process from death to final dissolution has not been conducted properly, and therefore the dead person is still in some way hanging around in the body. And in Greece it goes on, so the body of course is buried, but 15 or 20 years later, the bones are dug up and they're put in an ossuary so the grave can be reused. And that's a very public occasion. And when the bones are dug up, they've got to be nice clean white bones. If they're clean and white, the bones don't matter anymore, but everybody's happy. It means the dead person has really moved on. All the significance, all the personality, the life force has gone out of the bones, moved on, that's fine. If there is still flesh on the bones, though, that's really bad. Because it means that in some way, maybe because of sins, they well they haven't been reconciled, or whatever it might be, they're still hanging around. And then the priest has to perform a very serious absolution. And so, of course, the extreme of that is that if the body isn't decayed at all, that's really, really bad. But of course, there is a curious twist to this, because there's another sort of incorrupt corpse, which is the saint. The incorrupt saint. And it's very interesting how that you know incorrupt corpse can mean completely opposite things. Either somebody who is so holy that incorruption can take no hold on their body, or someone who is so unholy that corruption can't even start to take a grip because this this malevolent force is still pent up in the body. Now, how do you know which is which? Well, Duboulet, who studied those societies, said, well, actually, you know, people living there know perfectly well which is which, just from the context. But it but I think from the outside, this does seem very strange.

Michele McAloon:

It does. It has so one of the things I am a canon lawyer for the Roman Catholic Church. In the past, sanctity has been identified with incorrupt bodies, as you the incorruptible, as you put up. That's no longer true. That isn't a cause for sainthood. And I've actually seen incorrupt bodies, uh, you know, and uh I in Croatia, believe it or not. It's actually pretty incredible and creepy, even though they are saints. I mean it's still kind of weird, right? So uh that is just really interesting. What causes a corpse to reanimate? Why would a corpse want to come back? Your study in that is it really interesting.

Professor John Blair:

So I think there are various reasons for this. One is the one I mentioned about in incomplete process. So either the funeral's not being gone through properly, or life has been cut off short for some reason. The person, for example, has died, let's say, having committed crimes, or having sworn false oaths, or being on bad terms with neighbors. They haven't reconciled on their deathbed, and therefore these things are still pent up. They haven't been resolved and dissolved. So that's one reason. And that applies in particular in some contexts to women, particularly young women. And the female element in this is very interesting that in many cultures, the prime suspects for corpses that won't go away, won't, won't die, won't dissolve, is women who've died between the ages of about 15 and 25. And this seems to be because the life forces, the disturbing forces that are part of the process of female adolescence and which have been studied by neuropsychologists, for example, like Susanna Sullivan in her work on psychosomatic illnesses, or to take another example that are associated with things like poltergeist phenomena, you know, how often poltergeists are connected with adolescent girls. So there's a lot of folklore, possibly with some neurological basis, to do with the uncanny power of teenage women. Now, of course, as the women grow up, this dissipates, it goes away. But what happens if they die when they're, let's say, about 18, 20? So they haven't dissipated their forces, they're they're pent up in the body, and also they haven't married, they haven't had children, their lives have been cut short, they're unfulfilled, and they're resentful. They want to come back. They want to attack people who do have children, they want to attack children, maybe. And this idea of the malevolent young woman is very powerful in some societies, both in Europe and outside it. And it's particularly so in societies like early medieval northern Europe, where in the post-Roman period it seems that in any case, a lot of the rituals specialists were female. There's abundant evidence from grave goods in England and parts of Frankie in the 6th and 7th centuries for women who had amuletic objects, who seem to have been probably powerful magic workers, performers of rituals, maybe healers, or the opposite of healers, of course. They may be malevolent. So they need controlling after they've died. If they die at this dangerous stage, around the age of 15 to 20, then they maybe even more need controlling. And that's why, in many contexts, the archaeological evidence, the cases of bodies that have been mutilated in curious ways, which suggests posthumous killing, these are so often young women.

Michele McAloon:

That's funny, because you have the you what do you call them, the lump in male and the demonic woman, right?

Professor John Blair:

And yes, the demonic woman goes back, I think, a very long way. A lot of cultures have this image of the female flying demon. You get it in Mesoamerican cultures, for example. You get it in the earliest Mesopotamian sources. So the Mesopotamian demons, Lamashtu and Lilitu, who look as though they're probably descendants of the same prototype, who are airborne malevolent demons that attack people in various ways. And this idea is fused in some cultures, for example, probably in early Indian culture, Sanskrit cultures, with the idea of actual women. There also the idea of the woman who shape changes into foxes, flying foxes, perhaps. There's a crossover there. So she's shifty, she's crafty, she's also sexually predatory. And so you get this idea of the dead woman, and there is a very widespread storyline that seems to start in China around the first century AD, then turns up in the Eastern Roman Empire, and was eventually used by the Irish novelist Sheridan Lefeneux in his vampire story Carmilla, which was one of the famous 19th-century vampire stories. He used this motif. And it is that a young man meets a beautiful young woman and they they get friendly, they develop a sexual relationship. But what he the man doesn't realise is that actually she's dead and she's preying on him. And it then the story ends in various different ways, usually that discovered, and then her body is dug up and destroyed. It's a male anxiety, I think, in this, but it's an anxiety, I mean it's not just misogynistic, though it can be misogynistic. I think it's also an anxiety that arises in societies in which women genuinely were powerful, ritual specialists, magical specialists. And so it was the women who are powerful still after death.

Michele McAloon:

Okay, very interesting. Yeah, because you've got some great stories of capturing some of these stories of the people coming back and the mother-in-law and the, you know, or the bad nun, or and your book is filled with kind of these actually kind of charming stories about these people coming back and trying to settle the score for the light that was been unsettled, or very interesting. Why do vampires suck blood? That's an interesting one.

Professor John Blair:

Well, actually, the the first answer to that is that the great majority of active corpses don't suck blood. The blood sucking is a very particular motif. So there's an odd thing here that one story from 12th century England involves blood sucking, which makes me think that probably in the deep background, there is a blood sucking motif which comes and goes. But in most of the Scandinavian, Icelandic, English, Frankish material, we don't get blood sucking. They do harm in other ways. You usually you can't actually see them doing harm. So the way in which Count Dracula in Stoker's novel, you know, he walks around, he bites people, he sucks their blood, and then they become vampires. This is not how the European Walking Dead behave normally. The blood sucking seems to come from a different direction, which is the Caucasian, maybe West Asian zone of demonic beliefs, where we get blood-sucking demons who seem to fuse in that area with actual dead people. Those ideas fuse. And this really comes to a head in where our sources go, in first of all, Eastern Poland, Moravia, but then particularly in Serbia and Transylvania in the 1710s and 1720s. The Northern European walking corpse ideas seem to move around the Carpathians. They're coming from the Czech Republic, Poland, Moravia, round the Carpathians to Slovakia, southwards to areas like Transylvania, where they're fusing with these more southeasterly ideas after about 1720. And that is the point when the Austro-Hungarian authorities start to take an interest. And in the 1720s, on this very violent frontier between the Habsburg Empire and the Ottoman Empire, the militarized frontier, where there was not only a lot of instability, a lot of violence, but also epidemic disease, particularly in the winter, marshy areas, a lot of people dying of disease, these ideas really become rampant. And we start to get mass exhumations and killings of corpses. They're digging them up sometimes by the dozen and burning them. And the Habsburg authorities start to wonder what on earth is going on. And so Imperial Commissions were sent, including medics as well as soldiers. They sent back reports. In the 1720s, those reports started to get into first academic journals, usually either in Latin or in German, but then into newspapers, first in German, then in French, then in English. And of course, the just as for ever since then, they've had this sensational appeal. They had the sensational appeal then. And so in March 1732, English people opened their newspapers and they read this extraordinary story, what's been going on in Serbia, that these all these corpses have been thought to be walking around, biting people, sucking their blood. They dig them up, they behead them, they burn them. English people thought, bizarre. How on earth could this happen? It couldn't happen here. Well, actually, it had happened in England, but several hundred years earlier, and it had been forgotten about. But from that point on, it's the blood-sucking, Balkan vampire who becomes the prototype. And it goes on through the late 18th and 19th centuries. Of course, in different contexts, political writers like Voltaire, the vampire becomes a metaphor, a metaphor anything exploitative, exploitative classes like aristocracy or priests. Karl Marx talks about capital as being dead labor that preys vampire-like on living labor. So it's a very compelling metaphor. And then in the late 18th century, Goethe writes a poem, The Bride of Corinth, that again recycles the predatory dead female idea. Then Lord Byron, Polydori, goes on through the 19th century to Sheridan Lefanue. And then the climax, of course, is Bram Stoker's Dracula in 1897. And that is so powerful that it sweeps the board and really the Dracula sets the template for vampires, which ever since then has completely blanked out anything that people really believed in.

Michele McAloon:

Interesting. And you know, that story just keeps retelling and retelling. And maybe that's why we need those stories for some reason. We we need to have those stories and just the popularity of Bram Stoker. Okay, you come up with a word, and I'm not even sure I have it. I wrote it down, but anatarchaeology? What was the word?

Professor John Blair:

Archaeosanatology.

Michele McAloon:

Yes. Say that word again.

Professor John Blair:

Okay, archaeosanatology, yes. What is that? This is a very French word and a very French concept. The sort of quote science of studying scientifically human burials and working out the processes by which they came to take the forms they do. Now, this is all fine. I mean it's very good that people are looking at combinations of archaeologists, anatomists, anthropologists, looking at excavated burials critically. Because for a long time people have found, I mean, they excavate cemeteries. 99% of burials are laid out in a normal conventional way. The odd 1% are buried in strange ways. People make assumptions. It's an execution, maybe even live burial, people have sometimes thought. Or is it shameful, designed to shame the dead person? Or is it that the corpse is actually thought to be moving around or doing harm, and so it's got to be mutilated. So it's very good that this school of mainly friend scholars has made this into a precise academic discipline and has looked at a lot of burials. The trouble is that they, for some reason, which I don't understand, seem to exclude the possibility of posthumous killing of the dead from their considerations. And so the various works that have appeared recently find all kinds of really bizarre sometimes explanations, like, for example, bodies that have got the legs slashed with big cuts, it's it's marks done by the spade of the of somebody trying to rob the grave. Well, why are they always in the same place? I mean, it doesn't make sense. And so I I I've been a bit critical of the archaeophanatologists in my book and say, well, it's fine, you know, we ought to look at burials critically, but there is another ingredient that needs to be added in, which is how can we recognize when it's posthumous killing rather than execution or some other reason, grave robbing, you know, live burial, whatever. And in one chapter in the book, I've suggested a methodology for doing that, um, that there are certain things that are more likely to reflect corpse killing than others. I mean, beheading on its own, well, I mean, it could be just beheading is execution. But then if you've got beheading combined with, let's say, tying of the legs, placing the body face down, that begins to look a bit more peculiar. If you've got a tax on the heart, that is very suggestive, because it recurrently the heart is seen as the seat of life. So going all the way through from late Roman and early medieval to 19th century United States of America, where in it it all gets a new lease of life in New England in the 19th century, and bodies are thought to cause tuberculosis. So they're dug out and their hearts are cut out. So it goes all the way through. Heart can be cut out altogether, or it can be pierced with a stake. Now, if the heart is pierced with a wooden stake, you're probably not going to see that in an excavated burial because the stake will have rotted. I mean, there are occasional examples you do. If it's, let's say, pierced with an iron stake or a nail, or it's had a spear driven through it, as in one or two cases, then you will see it. For me, the most persuasive cases of all are ones where the body's been buried normally in the first instance, but then a few days or weeks or a small number of months after the burial, the grave's been opened and the body has been mutilated. Now, this is where the processes of decay are very important. Famously in Hamlet, Hamlet asks the gravedigger, how long does a man lie in the earth ere he rot? Well, that question is fundamental to a lot of what I'm saying in the book, because of course corpses rot at different trajectories. And you are we talked earlier about incorrupt saints, incorrupt vampires. What is incorruption? Well, really, incorruption is in the eye of the beholder, because some corpses rot very quickly, they're obviously, they're not, they're obviously not incorrupt. Others, though, because of diet or soil conditions or the nature of the coffin or whatever, can appear to be fairly intact quite a few weeks after burial. And if you open the coffin in the fearful expectation that there will still be life in the body, then there may be what are in fact purely chemical signs, which you will interpret as meaning there is still life in the body, it's actually dangerous, it's got to be dealt with. What do you do then? Well, one thing is that you don't necessarily need sharp tools to chop because the muscles will have decayed to the point you can certainly pull it apart. So you can pull the head off, you can pull the jawbone off the skull, you can throw them back in different parts of the grave. So if you get a grave, as in some of the seventh century English ones, which is excavated, and you find that the body has been pulled. Apart in that fashion, there is no sign on the bones of any chop marks. That I think is a very good sign that the body has been mutilated after burial, and therefore it it you can really it's very hard to think of a reason for doing that other than that it's perceived to be dangerous, especially since in the seventh century English cases they're mostly going in the same way. So the body's turned over partly or f or wholly, sometimes the legs are pulled off, sometimes it looks as though the heart may have been taken out. That's often hard to see. But normally the head is pulled off and the head is separated from the jawbone. And that's important, I think, because it means that the body can't it can't bite, it can't suck, but also it can't talk, it can't curse, it can't do spells. So all these things, it can't eat its shroud, which is something that is seen as a dangerous activity in some contexts. So all these things are prevented by separating the jaws. And I think this is a very good sign that these are deliberately killed corpses.

Michele McAloon:

Wow. Wow. Okay, let's deal with one story, and I want to be real careful dealing with this story, and that is the resurrection of Jesus Christ. And you have a really good, I I think you really encase that very well is with the what was going on in the Eastern Roman Empire at that time. Can you explain that to us?

Professor John Blair:

Yes, I think it's safe to start with. I mean, nobody, I think, regarded Jesus as a walking corpse in the sense of one of his animated corpses. Of course, the resurrected body of Jesus is special in various ways, but he does bear certain resemblances to some of them. In the first century, in the Eastern Empire, there is a lot of interest in uh dramatic phenomena, I mean various sorts, prodigies, marvels, uh which include things like uh corpses waking up on the battlefield conveying messages from the the next world and then and then dying again. Because Jesus is not quite like that, because uh we don't actually witness his resurrection, we don't see him getting up uh and walking out. What we see is that the tomb uh is empty. And there's the very powerful motif, of course, that we get in uh the Gospels that in Luke, for example, that that the Mary is go to the tomb uh expecting to be able to anoint the body, but they find that the the stone's been moved already and they go in the body's not there. So you know he's walking around because uh the graves clothes have been left, the tomb is open. Now that motif, I think, as far as we can see, does not come from beliefs in the walking dead, but it contributes to beliefs in the walking dead. There is no other recorded version of that story earlier than the resurrection of Jesus, but there are several that appear during the next hundred years. So in one of the stories of the amorous dead woman, the Thillinian story, which is told by Phlegon of Trales, who is an early second century Greek writer, Thelinian is a girl who comes back to a young man who's lodging in her parents' house, and the parents think, Oh, wonderful, she's come back. So they burst in when she's with this young man, but he says, Now you've spoiled it all because I've got I had an agreement with the powers of the underworld, but now you've found me out, I've got to go back. So she falls down dead. At that point, the authorities step in, they go to her tomb, they open the tomb, all the other bodies are there, but her body is not there. But some of the things that her lover gave her are on it. There's a similar story from a rather comical story from a second century Greek papyrus from Egypt. And I think what is happening is that preaching of early Christians around the shores of the Eastern Mediterranean is feeding into the developing beliefs about the walking dead. And so it's contributing a motif at these stories which are being told and are then being written down in this form by certain writers.

Michele McAloon:

Very interesting. It just speaks so much to our humanity and our divinity. Which tell us about the Hamung in America. That's an interesting tale, too. The I I think it's the Hammong, the the um people from Cambodia, they have walking dead.

Professor John Blair:

Well, this is the the nightmare effect. I mean, nightmare in the strict sense of night, what I call uh I spelt night hyphenmare, in in the original sense of something that oppresses you in the night, uh called by neuropsychologists, a sleep paralysis effect. And this is where we wake up. I mean, this is quite common. I've never experienced it myself, but I gather that maybe about one in five, one in ten people have sometimes experienced this, that you wake up, or you apparently wake up in the night, you feel fully awake, but you can't move, and something is sitting on you, something pressing down on you. It's what's famously depicted by the artist uh Henry Fuseley in his painting The Nightmare. Uh and uh this is one powerful reason, I think, for uh Walking Dead beliefs, because uh if you identify this being that's pressing on you as some person who's recently died, then of course you think it's their court. Because apparently to the people who suffer from this, it seems very real. It doesn't seem like a dream, but it's really happening. Now uh these refugees from Vietnam to America are uh come from a culture where that uh episode is culturally very strong. But uh when they got to America, they were an underclass, they were uh traumatized, they were disassociated from their their own background. Also, of course, they were enthusiastic, sometimes rather uncritically enthusiastic, attempts to convert them to Christianity, which just uh with the inadequate teaching, you know, they were baptized. It simply knocked away all their their old belief systems. So they were traumatized. And uh among these people there developed very acute version of the sleep paralysis where some of them actually died from it. They were so terrified that they were malnourished, they were generally uh worn down anyway. It's an extreme form of how in some societies, you know, stories could have easily have developed that so-and-so who died last week is coming back, is sitting on people at night and they're and they're they're frightened, they're injured, they're ill, they're dying. And so th this is a nice illustration of how what are probably to some extent just neurological universals can be heightened by culturally transmitted belief systems, then heightened again in situations of trauma. And it's a modern clinically studied illustration of something that may have been very widespread across the world.

Michele McAloon:

Interesting. Okay, I have to ask you, Professor, what was the most surprising thing you learned in this research? What was kind of that showstopping moment of really for you?

Professor John Blair:

I think the most surprising thing was to discover how common it is. You know, I started off just not knowing how common it will be across the world. I'd read Freud on the subject, which he uh suggested that it was going to be universal, but then I knew there were some societies where it didn't occur at all. I started to investigate, but then I found so many cases. And the extraordinary thing about these beliefs and the dangerous dead is that they are they are there in plain sight. They're abundantly recorded. Uh take, for example, early modern Central Europe. Now there is a big difference in witchcraft trials in that, of course, the witchcraft trials are legal processes. So they're recorded because they're top-downwards persecutors, inquisitors are trying people. There's a legal process. That only very, very rarely happens in the case of corpses. There are some examples like early 18th century Moravia, you get it a bit, but generally speaking, it's bottom upwards. People do it. The authorities either ignore it or they sort of vaguely disapprove, they don't really try much to stop it. But it only gets recorded when either theologians, curious people, you know, interested in marvels, and then eventually ethnographers, early scientists start to write it down. And so the recording must be very much less. Even so, you look, let's say, 16th century Germany, there's lots of evidence. You've just got to look for it. And I I'm not at all convinced that in those contexts any fewer corpses were killed than witches were killed, actually. It's just that we know much less about it. But also, we've studied it much less. And I think that's what I mean by saying that scholars have shied away from it because it just seems so weird. And I suspect actually some academics have thought, well, will it do my career any good if I say I'm studying vampires? You see, I'm retired, so I do what I like. And so that's why I have the luxury of doing this as a as a retirement project. That for me was the most surprising thing, but it is so common. Now, I'm sure I've missed a lot, I'm sure I've got something wrong. But I hope what I've done is to lay the groundwork for other people in the future who can come back, take what I've done as a starting point, and then look more at these societies, drill down more into some of these local case studies, and winkle out more of the detail.

Michele McAloon:

It's I tell you, folks, this is a fascinating book. It is so well researched, it is so well written. It's not fantastical. I mean, it's a serious book looking at really our humanity in so many different ways and how we react to stress and how we react as individuals, as groups, as families, as communities, with how our imagination copes with our reality. And I think you've done a brilliant job in this book. It's a good read. There's a lot of information, but it's not a difficult read at all. And it's just, I mean, you want to talk about a cocktail party conversation. This is it. Oh my word.

Professor John Blair:

Great pleasure.

Michele McAloon:

It's great. All right, Professor Blair, thank you very much because I know this is must be a busy time for you pre-Halloween, talking about vampires, and I really do appreciate it.

Professor John Blair:

I'm I'm it's a great pleasure. I'm delighted.

unknown:

Bye bye.