The​ word ‘vampire’ entered common parlance in the Anglophone world in 1732, as sensational reports arrived via German newspapers about an episode on the Serbian front in the wars between the Habsburg and Ottoman empires. A soldier called Arnaut Pavle had died after breaking his neck falling from a hay wagon. It was said that he had been troubled by vampires throughout his life and had eaten earth from their graves in an attempt to free himself from them. His corpse had refused to lie quietly: locals reported being bothered by it and it had been implicated in the murders of four people. It was exhumed and found uncorrupted, ruddy and vigorous looking; blood was flowing from its mouth and its nails were growing. The villagers drove a stake through it, at which it groaned and bled copiously; afterwards they burned it and dumped the remains back in the grave. Since it was believed that those killed by a vampire became vampires themselves, they also dug up the bodies of his four victims, which were found to be similarly free from decay and swollen with blood. All were given the same treatment.

This was the point at which the vampire took on a life of its own in Western popular culture. Reportage, legend and fiction combined to create its modern form and to sever it from its tangled roots in folklore. Most of the tropes that came to define the vampire – neck-biting, blood-drinking or invisibility in mirrors – are recent inventions, though some, such as the protective virtue of garlic, do have a historical basis. Other favourite monsters of modernity were similarly re-created: the most familiar element of the werewolf myth, the fatal silver bullet, was devised in 1941 for the Hollywood movie The Wolf Man, and the now ubiquitous zombie owes a far greater debt to George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead and its sequels than it does to its Caribbean ancestry.

John Blair isn’t overly preoccupied with definitions, though he is keen to make clear that the modern vampire is only one element in a pan-historical complex of beliefs. Etymology can be valuable however when tracing the transmission of beliefs between cultures. The word ‘vampire’ derives from the Slavonic upiór, which in turn has Turkic roots, indicating an origin further east. But Blair’s subject is broader, and perhaps better captured by the term ‘revenant’: a restless or vengeful corpse that refuses to remain buried and returns to menace the living. Bram Stoker’s coinage ‘the undead’ puts this idea at the centre of the vampire narrative; Blair uses ‘the dangerous dead’ as a generic term that both includes and escapes the modern story.

Blair, whose academic specialism is medieval history and archaeology, was drawn to the dangerous dead by the puzzling evidence of England’s Anglo-Saxon burials. In the East Anglian fens around 680 CE, for instance, a cluster of excavated graves attests to the practice of burying certain young women with protective amulets, iron nails and relic-boxes, and then disinterring them once decomposition had set in. At this point their remains were broken up, torsos twisted over to face downwards and craniums wrenched loose and moved down to the ribcage, as if to frustrate any attempt by their corpses to resurface. Another group, dating from the years between 1000 and 1190, presents a quite different picture. These burials are all of men, their corpses typically burned and hearts cut out, some sewn up in calfskins or dumped in bogs. In this period there are written chronicles to supplement the archaeology; the Benedictine historian William of Malmesbury tells us that in this case the dangerous dead were malefactors, some excommunicated and others corrupt priests, who had risen from their graves and were seen walking by night, groaning and spreading disease.

These two vampire epidemics, as Blair terms them, four centuries apart, suggest both a core of shared belief and an altered set of historical circumstances. What, for one thing, does the gender switch signify? Blair establishes that, across the globe and throughout history, revenants are more typically female than male. In many cultures dangerous female spirits have a supernatural identity of their own: the striga or lamia in classical Europe; the flying female demons of South-East Asia, Mesopotamia or Mexico; the predatory fox-women of Chinese folklore. Deceased adolescent girls are particularly dangerous: as well as being resentful at having their lives cut short, they are liable to set loose the violent disruptive powers associated with hauntings and poltergeists. Irrespective of gender, any premature death, especially when it is the result of a gross injustice such as murder, raises the fear of vengeful return. A neglected or unfinished burial rite risks allowing the dead to return among the living. The deaths of people who were disliked, vindictive or merely antisocial also raise fears that they will seek to settle scores from beyond the grave.

Historians have suggested material explanations for these fears, which are something close to a cultural universal. Paul Barber, in Vampires, Burial and Death (1988), argued that corpses do, under certain circumstances, behave in ways consistent with the legends. He consulted P.V. Glob’s 1965 study of the ‘bog people’ from Iron Age Scandinavia, whose bodies have been uncannily well preserved by their immersion in acidic and anoxic peat bogs. Some had been staked through the torso, and Barber argued that the reason for this might have been practical: to prevent the corpse from bloating with gas, rising from its watery grave and bobbing up to the surface. He proposed that other attributes of the vampire might have similar explanations. There are many environments in which corpses might fail to decompose and the natural process of saponification, by which body fat is transformed into a waxy pinkish tissue called adipocere, could account for the occurrence of incorruptible saints and the dangerous dead alike. In such cases the body can remain ruddy and plump; blood will naturally ooze from the mouth, the eyes can open and fingernails and hair appear to grow as the skin retracts.

Beyond the facts of post-mortem pathology, there are many other reasons the recently buried dead might be considered a source of danger. In some cultures the corpse is taken to be the vestige of the dead person’s identity, in others an empty vessel vulnerable to possession by a malign spirit. Societies from ancient Egypt to Siberia have seen the living human as the embodiment of a number of souls or life-forces; the corpse may host only a part of their identity or cohabit with another entity. It’s understandable that the dead should be angry or vengeful: after all, they have suffered a terrible calamity. There may be, as Freud proposed in Totem and Taboo, a ‘universal conviction that the dead, thirsting for blood, draw the living after them’. Death opens a portal that must be policed: in every human culture, burial is hedged about with ritual observance. Yet in certain historical moments the threat of the dangerous dead has flared up into a desperate and persistent conflict with the living. ‘It seems appropriate to adopt clinical terminology,’ Blair writes, ‘chronic versus acute, endemic versus epidemic.’

In searching for patterns to explain the phenomenon of vampire epidemics, Blair has almost too much material to draw on. Archaeological evidence is richly dispersed across the world and extends back into prehistory. But it’s often hard to interpret. In the 8000-year-old city of Çatal Höyük in Turkey, for example, there are human remains buried under the floors of the tightly-packed houses: the bones were disarticulated, the heads removed and the bodies seemingly excarnated – stripped of flesh – before being laid to rest. This was probably done by exposing them to vultures: wall paintings show birds attacking and scavenging headless corpses. In the paintings, however, the birds appear to have human legs, so it may be that they were priests (or priestesses) in vulture dress. Notwithstanding recent advances in forensic archaeology, the sequence of procedures that a corpse underwent before its final burial is hard to reconstruct: whether, for example, dismemberment or staking was a preventative measure or a response to a restless revenant.

‘Secondary burials’, as archaeologists refer to them, have been common practice in many places at different times and have been carried out for a variety of reasons. The measures taken to subdue the dangerous dead – breaking or binding limbs, removing the heart, hands or feet, staking and nailing, burning – are well evidenced, but difficult to distinguish from ceremonial and protective practices that leave the same traces. It’s often hard to tell whether or to what degree bodies were decomposed before they were acted on, and harder still to deduce much about the beliefs that prompted the intervention. There are contemporary cultures, for example in Madagascar or Sulawesi, that dispose of their dead in complex extended rituals involving excarnation, mummification and multiple reburials, which can continue for many years. Archaeologists also speak of ‘deviant burials’, in which bodies are buried standing up, for instance, or show signs of a disorderly struggle. These may have been cases of the dangerous dead, but could equally be evidence of judicial punishments, executions of captured warriors or sacrifices. Corpses have also been used as a source of medicines, not least in early modern Europe, where mumia, often obtained from Egyptian mummies but also from more recent graves, was a staple of apothecaries and physicians well into the 18th century. It is an irony that during the era when cannibalism became a signifier of barbarism and savagery, it was probably practised more widely in Europe than anywhere else.

The other major source for Blair’s investigations is folklore. As with archaeology, the problem here isn’t a shortage of evidence but making sense of an abundance of detail. Scouring Stith Thompson’s classic six-volume index of folk-literature motifs, he finds dozens of entries for supernatural encounters with the dead. Motif E236.1.1, for example, is ‘dead people who return to demand stolen rings’. There are instances from Lithuania, England and North Carolina, but it’s impossible to know whether these versions of the story are genealogically connected or merely carry similar meanings. One of the earliest known written accounts of the dangerous dead, a Greek source from around 120 CE, is of a Thracian girl who returned nightly to her lover, a tale that matches more recent oral tradition from rural Ireland. Folklore is, by definition, unreliable: as Barber points out, the term itself implies that the user doesn’t believe it. Folklore doesn’t tell us where it came from, or whether it emerged via diffusion or convergent evolution; the best we can do is trace themes and variations within a larger pattern. Blair accepts that beliefs about the dangerous dead ‘will never be slotted into a coherent family tree’. In the face of such vast uncertainties, he is guided by the assumption that even if many of us no longer believe the dead return to plague the living, the belief must have a logic and an adaptive value for those who do hold it.

By cross-referencing the various strands of evidence, Blair draws up a chain of transmission for vampire beliefs in Europe extending from classical mythology to the Enlightenment. The earliest written sources, cuneiform tablets from Assyria, fed into ancient Greek beliefs (Lilith and the lamia, for example), which were then absorbed by Rome and transmitted by such authors as Horace. These tales fused with indigenous beliefs in Roman Britain, as evidenced by decapitated and face-down burials, and across Northern Europe with Viking practices, folkloric night-flying demons and mythic traditions such as the Wild Hunt. These hybridised in turn with the local traditions of Eastern Europe and the Balkans, notably in places such as Bulgaria where ancient Mediterranean supernatural beliefs had clung on and were now recombined with their modified descendants.

After this conjunction​ , the modern notion of the vampire can be tracked much more confidently through the printed sources that produced it. The episode in Serbia in 1732, unlike previous epidemics, was documented in official reports by the Habsburg military authorities, which were picked up by the German press and then appeared promptly in Britain in the London Journal and the Gentleman’s Magazine. In 1746, the Benedictine abbot Augustin Calmet, a prodigious author and antiquarian, published Traité sur les apparitions des esprits et sur les vampires ou les revenans de Hongrie, de Moravie etc, a forerunner to Blair’s endeavour, which compiled and supplied a commentary on press reports, chapbooks and encyclopedia entries. It became the primary source on the subject; Calmet went on to publish expanded and revised editions and there were translations into English and German. The shift to print culture brought a change of tone: the folklore of the dangerous dead was now reported not as fact but lurid superstition, which became grist for disputations about science and religion. Voltaire, for example, used it to buttress his opinion that ‘the real vampires are the monks, who eat at the expense of kings and peoples.’ A parallel shift occurred with Chinese writers such as Ji Yun and his Shadow Book volumes of 1789-1800, in which he recorded the peasant beliefs of the northwestern borderlands of Ürümqi in similarly urbane and sceptical terms.

Blair sketches out the conditions that can tip a society’s endemic belief in the dangerous dead into an epidemic of mass exhumation and corpse-killing. These have typically unfolded against a background of social upheaval, such as the Black Death or the Reformation, where unquiet corpses were blamed for conflicts among a divided population. Sixteenth-century Saxony, for example, suffered an epidemic of ‘shroud-chewing’ corpses: noisy graves in which the dead were believed to be eating their own bodies and spreading plague as they did so. As Paul Barber showed, there are material reasons for strange sounds to emanate from graves – earth shifting around decomposing bodies, gas-distended abdomens exploding – but in this instance they were interpreted in accordance with the Protestant idea that the corpse was without a soul and that, therefore, any such activity could only be a trick of the Devil. From 1550 through to the 1590s, shroud-chewing corpses were repeatedly exhumed, especially during outbreaks of plague, and decapitated with an iron-edged spade.

In the 18th century, the war-torn borderland between Christian and Ottoman cultures was a perfect incubator for epidemics. The most destructive occurred in Moravia in the years after 1700, when the bishopric, its requests for guidance from Rome ignored, acted on testimony from local clergy that the threat from the dead was real and must be overcome by means of masses and exorcisms. Corpses were exhumed, reportedly still alive – even their clothes were said to move on their own. On one occasion the bodies of some fifty children were burned on a pyre; recent research has confirmed that at least 253 corpses were executed.

Vampires didn’t originate in the Balkans, but it’s perhaps not surprising that the region has become their mythical home. Outbreaks of corpse-killing continued there, and across Eastern Europe and Russia, until the late 19th century, especially in rural areas where traditional beliefs survived, periodically inflamed by disease and ethnic tensions. The dangerous dead have been documented in modern times in other parts of the world, notably West Africa and among the Afro-Caribbean diaspora, where the belief in revenants has merged with Catholicism – in the enduring zombi complex of Haiti, for instance, in which the spirit of the deceased isn’t in pursuit of vengeance but rather is forced to return to life as a judicial penalty.

Blair concludes his survey with a tale from Romania, told by a shepherd who exhumed a corpse from a cemetery at midnight and found it uncorrupted, with a red face and a freshly grown beard. He opened its ribcage, found the heart still beating, took it to a crossroads and burned it to ashes. ‘Readers of this book will feel on familiar ground here,’ he writes, but may be surprised to learn that the testimony was spoken into a video camera and that the incident took place in 2004. The filmed aftermath unfolded with flashing police lights and the shepherd ‘brandishing his pitchfork at the camera’ (it transpired that he had steeled himself for the deed by drinking half a litre of plum brandy). One of his fellow villagers commented: ‘For the community it’s very good, for the dead it’s very good, so where is the harm?’ Killing the dead is preferable, at least, to killing the living.