# A Deep Dive into Vampire Hysteria

An episode of [Human History ASMR](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/6793196842), 2 Oct 2026, 1 h 07 min.

Audio: https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/api.spreaker.com/download/episode/75487036/a_deep_dive_into_vampire_hysteria_human_voiced_no_ads.mp3

Journey into the dark history of vampire hysteria and discover how fear of the undead transformed from local folklore into one of the world's most enduring supernatural legends. Long before vampires became elegant figures of modern fiction, communities across Europe told frightening stories about corpses that supposedly returned from the grave to harm the living. Explore the origins of vampire-like beliefs in Eastern and Central Europe and discover how communities interpreted unexplained deaths, epidemics, strange illnesses, and the decomposition of human bodies. Learn why natural processes that are well understood today could appear terrifying and supernatural to people living centuries ago. The episode follows some of the most famous outbreaks of vampire hysteria, particularly during the 17th and 18th centuries. Discover how reports from villages in regions such as Serbia, Hungary, and the Balkans attracted the attention of local authorities, physicians, soldiers, clergy, and eventually European intellectuals. Explore the investigations, exhumations, testimonies, and unusual burial practices that helped spread stories of the undead. But vampire hysteria was not simply about superstition. Examine the social conditions that allowed these beliefs to flourish, including epidemics, sudden deaths, limited medical knowledge, religious beliefs, community tensions, and fear of the unknown. Discover how rumors could spread through villages and how authorities sometimes responded to supernatural accusations as though they represented genuine threats. The episode also explores how vampire stories traveled beyond the communities where they originated. Discover how newspapers, travel accounts, Enlightenment writers, medical discussions, and literary works transformed regional beliefs into a broader European fascination with vampires. Follow the evolution of the vampire from a feared corpse in rural folklore to the sophisticated supernatural figure later popularized by literature and film. Drawing on historical documents, burial archaeology, medical writings, folklore collections, eyewitness accounts, newspapers, and modern scholarship, this episode separates documented cases of vampire hysteria from later exaggerations and fictional inventions. Discover what people actually believed, why they believed it, and what these stories reveal about attitudes toward death and disease. Narrated with a calm, human voice, this immersive journey is perfect for history enthusiasts, folklore lovers, paranormal history fans, mythology listeners, relaxation, or listening before sleep. Enter the world of vampire hysteria and discover how fear, folklore, death, and misunderstanding created one of history's most enduring supernatural legends.

## Transcript

[0:00] Speaker 1: The year is 1732, and terrified peasants huddle around an
[0:06] Speaker 1: open grave in rural Serbia. By flickering torchlight they gaze
[0:12] Speaker 1: upon the corpse of Arnold Paola, a man dead for weeks,
[0:17] Speaker 1: yet strangely undecayed. Dried blood stains his lips. Heart-pounding, one
[0:25] Speaker 1: man drives a wooden stake into the chest, As later reported,
[0:32] Speaker 1: the corpse groans aloud, fresh blood gushing from the wound.
[0:37] Speaker 1: The villagers recoil in fear and fascination, and here they
[0:44] Speaker 1: are convinced that they have slain a vampire. I would
[0:51] Speaker 1: forgive you if you thought that was work of fiction,
[0:54] Speaker 1: but this is actually an eyewitness report. from an Austrian
[0:59] Speaker 1: official at the time. Such was the reality of vampire
[1:04] Speaker 1: hysteria in the early 18th century. Yet the fear of
[1:08] Speaker 1: the restless, blood-hungry dead is far more ancient and widespread
[1:13] Speaker 1: than this famous incident. If we travel back to the
[1:17] Speaker 1: 12th century, we find an English monk chronicling how a
[1:22] Speaker 1: reanimated corpse terrorized his village until it was dug up
[1:26] Speaker 1: and burned. Journey further to antiquity, and we can hear
[1:32] Speaker 1: Babylonian incantations against demons that devour flesh and suck from
[1:38] Speaker 1: the veins of the living. Across thousands of years, across
[1:43] Speaker 1: many cultures, people have shared an anxious question. Could the
[1:49] Speaker 1: dead return to prey upon the living? We're going to
[1:54] Speaker 1: talk about how different societies have understood and reacted to
[1:58] Speaker 1: the specter of the vampire, or their concept of it.
[2:03] Speaker 1: From ancient Mesopotamian demons and classical myths, through medieval tales
[2:08] Speaker 1: of revenants in Europe and Asia, to the mass panics
[2:12] Speaker 1: of the early modern period, the belief in vampires, or
[2:17] Speaker 1: their equivalents, has repeatedly gripped communities with terror. And it's
[2:23] Speaker 1: all about the first-hand accounts today, the desperate measures that
[2:27] Speaker 1: the villagers took to protect themselves, explanations that the learned offered,
[2:32] Speaker 1: and the curious common threads linking a Sumerian priest, a
[2:36] Speaker 1: Chinese scholar, and a Transylvanian peasant in a shared nightmare.
[2:42] Speaker 1: We'll get to them all. And so, if you hadn't
[2:46] Speaker 1: already figured it out already, we'll somewhat walk that blurry
[2:51] Speaker 1: line between history and myth, where history's vampire panics reveal
[2:58] Speaker 1: as much about human fears as they do any supernatural creature.
[3:04] Speaker 1: The story of the vampire is as much of a
[3:06] Speaker 1: story of our attempt to make sense of death and
[3:09] Speaker 1: the unknown as it is a catalogue of ghoulish legend.
[3:15] Speaker 1: So let's begin with all that in mind, in the
[3:18] Speaker 1: cradle of civilization, under the shadow Of those ancient blood-drinking demons.
[3:27] Speaker 1: But let me just quickly welcome you to the channel.
[3:30] Speaker 1: It's good to meet any newcomers. Tell me where you're
[3:33] Speaker 1: listening from. And good to see any people returning. Thank
[3:38] Speaker 1: you to those supporting on the Patreon. That really helps
[3:41] Speaker 1: keep the channel going. And those who checked out the
[3:44] Speaker 1: merch store. Thank you very much. Anyone who's not subscribed,
[3:48] Speaker 1: I encourage you to click that button. Right next to
[3:51] Speaker 1: the like button. Now let's begin. So we know this word, vampire.
[4:00] Speaker 1: It's not too much of an ancient word, but it
[4:03] Speaker 1: certainly is an ancient concept. And long before the term existed,
[4:08] Speaker 1: ancient peoples recounted legends of evil beings that rose from
[4:13] Speaker 1: the dead, or walked the earth but never truly lived,
[4:18] Speaker 1: feeding on human life. The earliest records come from Mesopotamia,
[4:23] Speaker 1: the lands of Babylon, Assyria and Sumer, and they're frankly
[4:29] Speaker 1: quite chilling. In Assyrian texts dating back over 3,000 years,
[4:35] Speaker 1: we find prayers to ward off the Akimu and Uduku
[4:40] Speaker 1: spirit entities with unmistakably vampiric traits. As for the Akimu,
[4:47] Speaker 1: It was said to be the angry ghost of somebody
[4:49] Speaker 1: who died without proper burial, doomed to wander and torment
[4:53] Speaker 1: the living until its body finally found rest. The Utuku
[4:58] Speaker 1: was a related spirit of the forgotten dead, a person
[5:02] Speaker 1: buried without the honor of funerary offerings. Hungry and resentful,
[5:09] Speaker 1: the Utuku might emerge from the underworld to stalk the living,
[5:14] Speaker 1: seeking sustenance from its victims. Some accounts explicitly describe these
[5:19] Speaker 1: creatures as blood drinkers. To exorcise them required complex rituals
[5:25] Speaker 1: and incantations by priests. One Assyrian incantation vividly describes a
[5:29] Speaker 1: horde of seven demons roaming in the night. It goes
[5:33] Speaker 1: like this. Seven are they, knowing no mercy. They rage
[5:39] Speaker 1: against mankind. They spill their blood like rain, devouring their
[5:45] Speaker 1: flesh and sucking their veins. demons, full of violence, ceaselessly
[5:52] Speaker 1: devouring blood. Well, that sounds like a vampire to me.
[5:59] Speaker 1: Such lines recorded in cuneiform on clay tablets are effectively
[6:04] Speaker 1: humanity's first anti-vampire tracts. The terror they convey is pretty palpable,
[6:10] Speaker 1: I'm sure you'll agree. A fear of malignant beings that
[6:14] Speaker 1: devour flesh and drink blood. all slaughtering without mercy. Clearly
[6:21] Speaker 1: the core image of the vampire, a relentless, bloodthirsty predator
[6:25] Speaker 1: from beyond the grave, was already very much present in
[6:28] Speaker 1: humanity's oldest literature. Interestingly, Mesopotamian lore even linked royalty to
[6:37] Speaker 1: vampiric demons. A Sumerian list of kings, dating to about
[6:42] Speaker 1: 2400 B.C., claims the hero, Gilgamesh's father, was a Lilu demon.
[6:49] Speaker 1: That's essentially a type of vampire spirit. You see, the
[6:55] Speaker 1: Lilu belong to a class of vampiric demons alongside female
[6:59] Speaker 1: counterparts like Lilitu and Ardat Lili. Lilitu, who survives in
[7:05] Speaker 1: later Hebrew traditions as Lilith, was depicted as beautiful, but
[7:10] Speaker 1: also murderous. notorious for preying on infants and young men.
[7:15] Speaker 1: A legend would evolve over millennia, but already in Sumer,
[7:21] Speaker 1: she was a blood-sucking creature from a nightmare. From Sumer
[7:27] Speaker 1: and Babylon, these ideas flowed into the cultures that followed.
[7:32] Speaker 1: The Hebrews, for example, absorbed Mesopotamian demonology and gave it
[7:37] Speaker 1: their own twists. The Old Testament Book of Proverbs says,
[7:42] Speaker 1: that's around 700 BC, contains a cryptic reference to an
[7:46] Speaker 1: insatiable bloodsucker. Quote, The Aluka has two daughters, crying, Give, give.
[7:57] Speaker 1: The Hebrew word Aluka literally means leech. But many scholars
[8:03] Speaker 1: interpret this passage as referring to a vampiric demon. In fact,
[8:08] Speaker 1: early translators of the Bible into English were so struck
[8:11] Speaker 1: by the similarity that one 19th century edition offers Vampire
[8:16] Speaker 1: as an alternate reading in the margin. Jewish folklore, likewise,
[8:22] Speaker 1: developed the figure of Lilith, that is, Lilitu's descendant, into
[8:27] Speaker 1: Adam's first wife-turned-demoness, a winged night creature who drank the
[8:32] Speaker 1: blood of infants and pregnant women. Lilith's legend was so
[8:37] Speaker 1: feared that the ancient Jewish families hung amulets in nurseries
[8:42] Speaker 1: to guard newborns from her deadly embrace. The classical world
[8:48] Speaker 1: of Greece and Rome, well, they knew their share of
[8:51] Speaker 1: blood-drinking monsters too. As trade and ideas passed from the
[8:57] Speaker 1: near east of the Mediterranean, the vampire motive took on
[9:00] Speaker 1: new forms. The Greeks spoke of the Lamia, originally from
[9:06] Speaker 1: a mythic Libyan queen, cursed by Zeus' wife Hera to
[9:10] Speaker 1: become a child-eating demon. Lamia was said to lurk in darkness,
[9:15] Speaker 1: seducing young men or snatching infants to drain their blood,
[9:20] Speaker 1: and she could also shapeshift, often depicted with the face
[9:23] Speaker 1: of a woman and the lower body of a serpentine monster.
[9:29] Speaker 1: Greek mothers would warn unruly children that Lamia, or the Emposai,
[9:35] Speaker 1: Another breed of female demon, supposedly the servants of the
[9:39] Speaker 1: goddess Hecate, might catch them in the night. And that term, Emposa,
[9:45] Speaker 1: described a terrifying she-demon with one brass leg, who could
[9:50] Speaker 1: appear as beautiful to lure men, and then, once they
[9:54] Speaker 1: were off their guard, feast on the flesh and blood.
[9:57] Speaker 1: These creatures... appear in Greek literature, including comedic plays by
[10:04] Speaker 1: Aristophanes and later folklore. Clearly, the fear of female nightstalkers
[10:11] Speaker 1: who consume womb and blood was well rooted in the
[10:15] Speaker 1: Greek imagination. But we can't go past the Romans They
[10:20] Speaker 1: inherited the Greek lore, and they added their own name
[10:23] Speaker 1: for such beings. Strix, plural being Striges. A Strix, in
[10:30] Speaker 1: Roman myth, was a kind of evil spirit or witch
[10:33] Speaker 1: that turned into a nocturnal bird, often envisioned as an owl,
[10:38] Speaker 1: to prey upon sleeping children. Roman poets like Ovid wrote
[10:43] Speaker 1: about the Striges in ways that sound startlingly close to
[10:47] Speaker 1: later vampire tales. In Ovid's Fasti, for instance, he recounts
[10:53] Speaker 1: how a pair of strigas attacked an infant prince named
[10:56] Speaker 1: Procus in his cradle at night. They swooped in to
[11:00] Speaker 1: suck the blood from the baby's body, and were only
[11:03] Speaker 1: driven off when the householder woke to the child's screams.
[11:08] Speaker 1: Though the attack was thwarted, the baby was left pale
[11:12] Speaker 1: and weak, with mysterious scratches on his cheeks. Telltale signs,
[11:17] Speaker 1: it was thought, of an assault of a Strix. To
[11:22] Speaker 1: protect little Procas, the Romans performed a ritual. At the
[11:27] Speaker 1: next dark moon, they hung garlic and wolf's bane around
[11:30] Speaker 1: the window, and smeared the threshold with the blood of
[11:33] Speaker 1: a piglet as an offering, to keep the Strigas at bay. Garlic, notably,
[11:40] Speaker 1: was believed to repel these creatures, just as it does
[11:44] Speaker 1: in modern vampiric lore. a fascinating example of continuity in
[11:49] Speaker 1: folk medicine. Deep roots on that one. But Roman writers
[11:55] Speaker 1: even mention placing garlic or hawthorn in cradles as a
[11:59] Speaker 1: ward against Strix attacks. The use of hawthorn wood in particular,
[12:04] Speaker 1: a white thorn stake essentially, to stab or repel Strix
[12:08] Speaker 1: foreshadows the classic wooden stake used against vampires centuries later.
[12:15] Speaker 1: But beyond the well-known Mediterranean and Mesopotamian worlds, vampire-like myths
[12:20] Speaker 1: can be found in other ancient cultures too. In ancient India,
[12:25] Speaker 1: early sacred texts in folklore spoke of demons and spirits
[12:30] Speaker 1: that drank blood or possessed the dead. The Sanskrit language
[12:35] Speaker 1: gives us Vettelas, undead beings who inhabit corpses. By the
[12:42] Speaker 1: first millennium CE, if not earlier, Indian storytellers were spinning
[12:47] Speaker 1: complex tales about King Vikramaditya and a vetala, stories compiled
[12:53] Speaker 1: in the vetala Bansamvimstani, the 25 tales of the vetala
[12:58] Speaker 1: around the 11th century. Each tale centres on the vetala,
[13:03] Speaker 1: sometimes translated as vampire in English retellings, that animates a
[13:08] Speaker 1: corpse and torments the king with riddles. While these stories
[13:13] Speaker 1: are more fables than horror yarns, the Vatala is clearly
[13:17] Speaker 1: a restless undead spirit, hanging upside down from trees and cemeteries,
[13:24] Speaker 1: and delighting in mischief and death. The very concept shows
[13:29] Speaker 1: an Indian understanding that some dead do not rest quietly. Likewise,
[13:36] Speaker 1: a little further east, ancient China harboured early ideas of
[13:39] Speaker 1: reanimated corpses, Texts from the Zhou and Han dynasties hinted
[13:45] Speaker 1: beliefs that improper burial or lingering malevolent spirit energy could
[13:49] Speaker 1: cause a corpse to rise. The Chinese did not have
[13:52] Speaker 1: a single famous vampire myth in antiquity, but they did
[13:56] Speaker 1: fear the hungered dead. For instance, some Han era documents
[14:03] Speaker 1: mentioned corpses that would not decompose and might trouble the living.
[14:08] Speaker 1: and Taoist priests were employed to exercise or pacify such entities.
[14:14] Speaker 1: As we shall see later, these beliefs would eventually crystallize
[14:18] Speaker 1: in the form of the Jiangshi, hopping corpse, or rather,
[14:23] Speaker 1: rigid corpse in a more literal translation, during the imperial era,
[14:29] Speaker 1: perhaps the only vampire that exhibits signs of rigor mortis.
[14:33] Speaker 1: It's interesting. But even in the ancient Americas, They had
[14:38] Speaker 1: their blood-sucking spectres in their own mythology. The Aztecs of Mexico,
[14:42] Speaker 1: for example, warned of the Cihuatetio, a vengeful spirit of
[14:48] Speaker 1: a woman who died in childbirth. These ghostly women were
[14:52] Speaker 1: said to roam on certain nights, attacking infants and drinking
[14:56] Speaker 1: the blood of children. The Maya had the Camazotz, a
[15:01] Speaker 1: deity depicted as a monstrous bat associated with caves and night.
[15:06] Speaker 1: Not a vampire, per se, but a bat god that
[15:09] Speaker 1: could easily be seen as an antecedent to later bat-associated
[15:12] Speaker 1: vampiric lore. Meanwhile, in parts of Africa, tribal folklores spoke
[15:19] Speaker 1: of creatures like the Asambosam of the Ashanti people, a
[15:24] Speaker 1: sinister being dwelling in trees with iron hooks for feet
[15:28] Speaker 1: and teeth of iron, who would drop on unsuspecting past
[15:32] Speaker 1: spies to bite their throats. Though these African and American
[15:38] Speaker 1: legends developed independently, they share a haunting resemblance to the
[15:43] Speaker 1: vampire archetype, the dead or demonic coming back to prey
[15:47] Speaker 1: on the living, often specifically on their blood or life force.
[15:53] Speaker 1: And by the dawn of the Middle Ages, the mythic
[15:56] Speaker 1: prototype of the vampire, a revenant that subsisted on human blood,
[16:01] Speaker 1: was already ancient and global. whether it was the Akimu
[16:05] Speaker 1: Lilastrix Vitala, or by any other name, virtually every civilization had,
[16:12] Speaker 1: at some point, some concept of a blood-craving creature of
[16:16] Speaker 1: the night. Importantly, these early beliefs were typically part of
[16:21] Speaker 1: religion and mythology. There were fears in stories, yes, but
[16:28] Speaker 1: often managed by priests and magicians through rituals. Now the
[16:33] Speaker 1: real hysteria, the kind of communal panic that drives villagers
[16:39] Speaker 1: to dig up graves, that would come a little later.
[16:44] Speaker 1: See that develop. We have to turn to how medieval societies,
[16:48] Speaker 1: especially in Europe, began to interpret these age-old fears in
[16:52] Speaker 1: the context of their own worldview. So we arrive in
[16:59] Speaker 1: the medieval period, roughly the 5th to the 15th centuries,
[17:04] Speaker 1: which brought a shift in how vampiric phenomena was perceived.
[17:08] Speaker 1: In Christian Europe, classical demons like Lamia and Strix were
[17:12] Speaker 1: reinterpreted through a more Christian lens. They became associated with
[17:18] Speaker 1: the devil. Witchcraft was simply folded into a broad category
[17:23] Speaker 1: of evil spirits. At the same time, ordinary folk throughout
[17:28] Speaker 1: Europe continued to believe that sometimes the dead could physically
[17:33] Speaker 1: return from the grave. These were usually called revenants from
[17:38] Speaker 1: the French, revenir meaning to return, rather than vampires. The
[17:44] Speaker 1: term vampire itself was unknown in the West until the
[17:47] Speaker 1: 18th century. But the behavior of these revenants often powered
[17:54] Speaker 1: out what we think of as vampiric. They rose from
[17:58] Speaker 1: the tomb, played the living with harm or disease, and
[18:02] Speaker 1: had to be corporeally destroyed to save the community. In
[18:08] Speaker 1: an era wracked by plagues, warfare, and deep religiosity, stories
[18:13] Speaker 1: like this flourished. And crucially, they were often believed and
[18:18] Speaker 1: recorded as true occurrences. One of the most remarkable medieval
[18:24] Speaker 1: chronicles of revenants was William of Newburgh, a 12th century
[18:28] Speaker 1: English monk and historian. In his Historia Rerum Anglicarum, that is,
[18:35] Speaker 1: History of the English Affairs, alongside accounts of kings and battles,
[18:40] Speaker 1: William included several hair-raising tales of the restless dead. He
[18:45] Speaker 1: introduces these by frankly admitting that they might sound unbelievable.
[18:51] Speaker 1: but insisting that, quote, did not frequent examples occurring in
[18:56] Speaker 1: our own times suffice to establish this fact, I would
[18:59] Speaker 1: not have dared recount them. In other words, William, an educated,
[19:07] Speaker 1: God-fearing clergyman, felt compelled to report these cases because so
[19:11] Speaker 1: many eyewitnesses swore on their lives that they were true.
[19:14] Speaker 1: One such case took place in the quiet countryside of Yorkshire,
[19:20] Speaker 1: a story sometimes dubbed the amorous reverend. A recently deceased man,
[19:27] Speaker 1: notable in his life as sinful and lustful behaviour, was
[19:32] Speaker 1: buried in the local graveyard. But according to William, he
[19:36] Speaker 1: did not rest in peace. Shortly after his burial, the
[19:41] Speaker 1: man's corpse began to get up and wander at night.
[19:46] Speaker 1: He first returned to his own house, entering his widow's
[19:49] Speaker 1: bed and attempting to lie with her in the marital bed.
[19:54] Speaker 1: The terrified woman described being nearly crushed by the weight
[19:56] Speaker 1: of his dead body as he climbed atop her— a detail
[20:00] Speaker 1: that William relays with horror. After terrorizing his wife, the
[20:05] Speaker 1: revenant roamed through the village. pounding on doors and calling
[20:09] Speaker 1: out the names of his neighbours. Everyone who heard the
[20:13] Speaker 1: knock or voice fell gravely ill in the days that followed.
[20:17] Speaker 1: The entire village was in a complete panic. No one
[20:21] Speaker 1: dared to go outside after dusk. The local priest finally
[20:25] Speaker 1: consulted the Bishop of Lincoln, who happened to be the
[20:28] Speaker 1: famous St. Hugh, by the way. The Bishop's solution was
[20:33] Speaker 1: not to organise a torch-wielding mob, but rather a spiritual remedy.
[20:39] Speaker 1: He wrote out a letter of absolution for the dead
[20:41] Speaker 1: man's soul and had it read aloud and buried with
[20:44] Speaker 1: the corpse. According to William, this act of piety finally
[20:50] Speaker 1: put the spirit to rest for good, an elegantly non-violent
[20:56] Speaker 1: end to a vampire-like infestation. Isn't that fantastic that this
[21:03] Speaker 1: is happening almost 900 years ago and we have the
[21:07] Speaker 1: accounts all written down for us. Well, unfortunately, not all
[21:15] Speaker 1: medieval revenant stories ended so gentle. In another case, William
[21:21] Speaker 1: recounts a wayward monk in Yorkshire died unrepentant and was
[21:27] Speaker 1: buried on monastery grounds. But soon after, strange occurrences plagued
[21:34] Speaker 1: the area at night. The dead monk was seen lurking
[21:37] Speaker 1: around the living quarters, and those who encountered him fell sick.
[21:43] Speaker 1: Taking matters into their own hands, a group of robust
[21:45] Speaker 1: monks waited in ambush by his grave one night, and
[21:49] Speaker 1: sure enough, the corpse clawed its way out under the
[21:53] Speaker 1: cover of darkness. The watchers chased down the shrouded figure
[21:58] Speaker 1: and struck it with an axe, causing the revenant to
[22:01] Speaker 1: howl and flee back to its tombs. The next morning
[22:06] Speaker 1: the monks exhumed the body. They found it looking unnaturally
[22:10] Speaker 1: flush with blood, and fresh axe wounds marred its flesh.
[22:16] Speaker 1: To them that was concrete evidence that this was no
[22:19] Speaker 1: ordinary corpse. The immediate solution was one that would become
[22:24] Speaker 1: standard in later vampiric lore. They burned the body to ashes,
[22:30] Speaker 1: and it was only then that the attacks ceased. William
[22:35] Speaker 1: of Newborough's most famous revenant tale took place in the
[22:38] Speaker 1: town of Berwick. There, a wealthy, but by all accounts
[22:43] Speaker 1: wicked man died and was buried in the churchyard. And
[22:47] Speaker 1: soon after, people reported a giant black dog chasing a
[22:51] Speaker 1: spectral figure through the streets at night. A dead man,
[22:56] Speaker 1: pursued by the howling hounds of hell. Those who glimpsed
[23:01] Speaker 1: the revenant described it as a corporeal horror. the townsfolk
[23:06] Speaker 1: fearing pestilence, for in medieval thinking a walking corpse spread
[23:11] Speaker 1: miasma and could bring plague, and it finally forced them
[23:15] Speaker 1: to act. According to William, ten young men, renowned for
[23:21] Speaker 1: their boldness, were deputized to unearth the pestiferous corpse. They
[23:28] Speaker 1: did so in daytime, while the creature presumably lay inactive.
[23:33] Speaker 1: and what they found in the coffin made their blood
[23:36] Speaker 1: run cold. The body was bloated to an enormous corpulence
[23:42] Speaker 1: and suffused with blood. It looked as if it had
[23:46] Speaker 1: feasted on the blood of the living. Enraged, the young
[23:50] Speaker 1: men hacked the corpse to pieces and burnt it to ash. This,
[23:55] Speaker 1: they hoped, would end their nightmare. But alas, Beric was
[24:00] Speaker 1: soon hit with an outbreak of illness anyway, which the
[24:03] Speaker 1: chronicle dryly notes, carried off a great portion of the town.
[24:09] Speaker 1: But at least the revenant itself troubled them no more.
[24:13] Speaker 1: One problem at a time, I suppose. The people blamed
[24:16] Speaker 1: the earlier presence of the undead for poisoning the air
[24:19] Speaker 1: with plague, a belief that shows how vampirism and disease
[24:23] Speaker 1: were often linked in the pre-modern mind. Medieval writers from
[24:29] Speaker 1: other parts of Europe echoed these accounts. In the Holy
[24:32] Speaker 1: Roman Empire from at least the 12th century, we hear
[24:36] Speaker 1: of the natchzerea, or the literally after devourer, a type
[24:41] Speaker 1: of Germanic revenant that stayed in its night grave but
[24:45] Speaker 1: was thought to chew on its shroud or its own flesh,
[24:49] Speaker 1: thus mystically draining life from surviving family members. The recommended
[24:56] Speaker 1: defense was to exhume the corpse and place a brick
[24:59] Speaker 1: or stone in its mouth to stop the chewing. or
[25:03] Speaker 1: simply just decapitate the body. Practices archaeologists have indeed documented
[25:09] Speaker 1: in medieval cemeteries. For example, a skull from the 16th
[25:13] Speaker 1: century Venice was discovered with a brick forcefully wedged between
[25:16] Speaker 1: its jaws. Almost certainly an instance of a suspected shroud-eater
[25:23] Speaker 1: vampire burial. In Eastern Europe, the seeds of the classic
[25:28] Speaker 1: vampire were present in the folklore of the Slavic and
[25:31] Speaker 1: Balkan peoples. as early as the 11th century, a Russian
[25:36] Speaker 1: prince was nicknamed Upir Lichi, meaning wicked vampire in the document,
[25:42] Speaker 1: first recorded use of the form of the word vampire.
[25:48] Speaker 1: Throughout the Slavic clans, various terms existed, referring to an
[25:53] Speaker 1: undead blood drinker or similar revenant. Typically, it was believed
[25:58] Speaker 1: that certain people, especially the unbaptized, excommunicated, or those who
[26:03] Speaker 1: had taken their own lives or practiced sorcery, or perhaps
[26:07] Speaker 1: victims of an unnatural death, were especially prone to return
[26:11] Speaker 1: as vampires. To prevent this, villagers took preventative measures with corpses,
[26:18] Speaker 1: staking them into their graves with thorns or iron rods,
[26:22] Speaker 1: burying them at crossroads, placing sickles or nets in the coffin.
[26:27] Speaker 1: The idea was that the vampire would be so preoccupied,
[26:30] Speaker 1: counting the nets' holes or entangled by the sickle that
[26:35] Speaker 1: it wouldn't even rise, or even they just started cremating
[26:39] Speaker 1: the body shortly after death. These preventative folk customs were widespread,
[26:45] Speaker 1: though often done quietly and without official church sanction. The
[26:52] Speaker 1: Catholic and Orthodox churches of the Middle Ages had an
[26:55] Speaker 1: uneasy stance on these superstitions. Officially, the idea of a
[27:00] Speaker 1: dead body coming back to life under its own power
[27:03] Speaker 1: was frankly heretical. Christian doctrine expected the resurrection only at
[27:09] Speaker 1: the end of days, not just random ghouls in the interim.
[27:15] Speaker 1: If a corpse walked, the Church maintained, it must be
[27:19] Speaker 1: the work of the devil, not the person's soul. Nonetheless,
[27:26] Speaker 1: Local priests were pragmatic. They had to respond somehow. We
[27:30] Speaker 1: saw Bishop Hugh of Lincoln advising a letter of absolution.
[27:35] Speaker 1: Others permitted or even ordered the physical destruction of suspected
[27:39] Speaker 1: vampires in particularly dire cases. Walter Mapp, a twelfth-century cleric
[27:46] Speaker 1: and courtier in Wayhorse, recounts one such incident. In Herefordshire,
[27:51] Speaker 1: a wicked man, as they said, died and was buried.
[27:58] Speaker 1: But soon the townsfolk heard him calling out at night,
[28:00] Speaker 1: shouting the names of those who would soon die. Panic ensued,
[28:06] Speaker 1: as people indeed fell ill after hearing their name. The
[28:09] Speaker 1: matter reached the Bishop of Hereford, Gilbert Folliot, who delivered
[28:14] Speaker 1: a crisp instruction reminiscent of a modern horror movie script. Quote,
[28:20] Speaker 1: Dig up the body and cut off the head with
[28:22] Speaker 1: a spade. Sprinkle it with holy water. and reinter it
[28:28] Speaker 1: the villagers followed the orders beheading the corpse and dousing
[28:32] Speaker 1: it in holy water before reburying it and surprise surprise
[28:38] Speaker 1: the nocturnal deaths ceased a testament in the chronicler's view
[28:43] Speaker 1: to the efficacy of combining folk medicine i.e. decapitation which
[28:49] Speaker 1: is well it's perhaps the most medieval medicine you can
[28:53] Speaker 1: get with spiritual authority holy water. Medieval Northern and Western
[29:02] Speaker 1: Europe thus certainly knew vampire-like phenomena, usually under that old
[29:07] Speaker 1: label of revenants, demons or even witches. But it was
[29:12] Speaker 1: in the Balkans and Eastern Europe where the vampire concept
[29:17] Speaker 1: truly thrived in folklore at this time. The word vampire
[29:22] Speaker 1: itself likely comes from Serbian or related Slavic languages. Eastern
[29:28] Speaker 1: Orthodox Christian believes how that improperly buried or morally corrupt
[29:33] Speaker 1: individuals might become unclean spirits after death. In Greek tradition,
[29:40] Speaker 1: for instance, those excommunicated by the Church were feared to
[29:44] Speaker 1: become revenants whose bodies wouldn't decay and rise up to
[29:48] Speaker 1: trouble the living until the ban was lifted or the
[29:52] Speaker 1: corpse destroyed. Numerous Greek and Balkan folktales from the late
[29:58] Speaker 1: medieval era onward describe reanimated corpses that randomly knock on doors,
[30:04] Speaker 1: attack people, drink blood, or just create poltergeist-like havoc. Killing livestock,
[30:11] Speaker 1: smashing up the furniture, that sort of thing. The remedies
[30:16] Speaker 1: read like a catalogue of anti-vampire techniques. It's really interesting. Exhumation,
[30:22] Speaker 1: staking with wood or iron, burning the heart or the
[30:25] Speaker 1: entire corpse. even boiling the remains in wine after reburial
[30:32] Speaker 1: at crossroads. It's important to note that these actions were
[30:36] Speaker 1: usually taken in a state of communal alarm, essentially hysteria,
[30:42] Speaker 1: when unexplained deaths or misfortunes struck and villagers groped for
[30:47] Speaker 1: a cause. In an age-before germ theory, if a whole
[30:52] Speaker 1: family fell ill one after another, what more dramatic cause
[30:56] Speaker 1: than a predatory dead relative. Thus, a plague of tuberculosis
[31:03] Speaker 1: in a village might simply be blamed on a recently
[31:06] Speaker 1: deceased neighbor who was now feeding on the survivors from
[31:09] Speaker 1: beyond the grave. Outside of Europe, medieval chroniclers also speak
[31:15] Speaker 1: of blood-drinking spirits. In the Middle East, the concept of
[31:19] Speaker 1: the ghoul— that' s right, ghoul is their name for it— became prominent
[31:25] Speaker 1: in Arabic lore. Ghouls were desert-dwelling fiends, often female, who
[31:33] Speaker 1: feasted on human flesh and lurked in cemeteries, essentially an
[31:38] Speaker 1: Arabic version of a vampire-like creature, first mentioned in pre-Islamic
[31:42] Speaker 1: poetry and later popular through their Thousand and One Nights.
[31:47] Speaker 1: While ghouls were more corpse-eaters than living blood-drinkers, the line
[31:52] Speaker 1: was pretty thin. They were said to waylay travellers, sometimes
[31:56] Speaker 1: draining them of blood, other times devouring their flesh. Islamic
[32:01] Speaker 1: theologians debated the reality of such beings, classing them generally
[32:06] Speaker 1: as a type of jinn, that is, evil spirit. But nonetheless,
[32:12] Speaker 1: common people in the medieval Islamic world certainly took ghouls seriously.
[32:16] Speaker 1: There are accounts of graveyards viewed as accursed because a
[32:20] Speaker 1: ghoul was believed to haunt them. In Persia and South Asia,
[32:25] Speaker 1: Under Islamic influence, we find mentions of Pasik dew or
[32:29] Speaker 1: other local demons that drink blood. Traditional remedies often combine
[32:34] Speaker 1: spiritual recitation of Quranic verses with physical measures, like staking
[32:40] Speaker 1: suspected ghouls or using iron blades. Iron was considered to
[32:45] Speaker 1: be harmful to jinn. Meanwhile, in medieval India, but even
[32:51] Speaker 1: revenants and spirit vampires continued alongside Hindu and Buddhist practices.
[32:58] Speaker 1: We've already mentioned those vitala tales that illustrate the idea
[33:01] Speaker 1: of possessed corpses. But additionally, Indian folklore feared beings like
[33:07] Speaker 1: the Buddha or Preta, the restless ghouls of someone who
[33:11] Speaker 1: died violently or with unfulfilled desires. These entities could sometimes
[33:18] Speaker 1: take physical form to attack the living or, Alternatively, possess
[33:22] Speaker 1: a living person and turn them vampiric. To guard against them,
[33:26] Speaker 1: Indians would perform rites, recite mantras, or in some cases
[33:31] Speaker 1: drive nails into the corpse's feet or neck to pin
[33:34] Speaker 1: it to the earth, parallel to a western stake, I suppose.
[33:40] Speaker 1: An eleventh-century anthology records that people in cremation grounds would
[33:44] Speaker 1: scatter mustard seeds or offer blood sacrifices. to appease or
[33:49] Speaker 1: at least distract the Fatalas and Butas. Interestingly akin to
[33:54] Speaker 1: the European practice of scattering grains at graves, so a
[33:57] Speaker 1: vampire would be forced to stop and count them, according
[34:01] Speaker 1: to law. Such cross-cultural parallels suggest a common human desire
[34:06] Speaker 1: to use folk magic against an imagined threat from the dead.
[34:11] Speaker 1: But I do like this idea that vampires have to
[34:15] Speaker 1: stop and count things. It's like for some reason they're
[34:20] Speaker 1: thinking that all of the vampires have this kind of OCD. Maybe. Well,
[34:29] Speaker 1: either way, by the end of the medieval period, the
[34:31] Speaker 1: stage was set for the transition from scattered folklore to
[34:37] Speaker 1: outright vampire panics. The idea of the physical undead was
[34:42] Speaker 1: ingrained in many cultures. Society had developed a toolkit of
[34:47] Speaker 1: responses from prayers and absolutions all the way up to
[34:50] Speaker 1: burnings and decapitations, whichever one comes first. Yet most of
[34:56] Speaker 1: these events were local and only sporadically documented. That would
[35:01] Speaker 1: change in the early modern era when improved communication, the
[35:05] Speaker 1: spread of printed reports, scholarly letters and government inquiries meant
[35:09] Speaker 1: that a vampire crisis in one village could suddenly become
[35:14] Speaker 1: international news. Ironically, as the world entered the age of enlightenment,
[35:22] Speaker 1: fear of vampires would reach a new fever pitch. The
[35:30] Speaker 1: early modern period, round the 16th to 18th centuries, witnessed
[35:35] Speaker 1: some of the most famous outbreaks of vampire hysteria, particularly
[35:39] Speaker 1: in Eastern Europe. These episodes are pretty noteworthy, not only
[35:44] Speaker 1: for the fervor of the common folk, but for the
[35:46] Speaker 1: fact that they came under the scrutiny of educated officials
[35:50] Speaker 1: and scholars. Which is a good thing. It sparks a
[35:54] Speaker 1: wider debate. In a sense, vampires sort of... they were everywhere.
[36:01] Speaker 1: Going viral in an old-fashioned way, I suppose. Pamphlets, newspapers
[36:06] Speaker 1: and learned treatises across Europe began discussing and disputing them.
[36:11] Speaker 1: it had become quite a hot topic, and what had
[36:14] Speaker 1: been a contained folklore belief now became something of scientific
[36:18] Speaker 1: and philosophical contention. So, let's talk about a few key
[36:23] Speaker 1: incidents that fed this machine of vampire mania. One epicenter
[36:29] Speaker 1: of early 18th century vampire panics was the Habsburg-controlled regions
[36:34] Speaker 1: of Serbia and Wallachia, that is, roughly modern-day Serbia and Romania.
[36:41] Speaker 1: These areas on the fringe of empires and at the
[36:44] Speaker 1: crossroads of East and West had long-standing local legends of vampires,
[36:49] Speaker 1: often called Strigoi as well, by the way. After the
[36:53] Speaker 1: Ottoman Empire ceded northern Serbia to Austria in 1718, Austrian
[36:57] Speaker 1: administrators encountered these beliefs head-on. In the late 1720s and 1730s,
[37:04] Speaker 1: a series of unusual deaths in Serbian villages led to
[37:08] Speaker 1: official investigations. that produced some of the most detailed primary
[37:12] Speaker 1: accounts of these supposed vampires. The first case to gain
[37:18] Speaker 1: renown was that of Petar Blagojevic, often Germanized to Peter Blagojawicz,
[37:26] Speaker 1: in 1725. In a village called Kisilova, Blagojevic died and
[37:35] Speaker 1: was buried, and by all accounts it was a normal death. However,
[37:41] Speaker 1: I'm sure you're waiting for the twist. Within a week,
[37:45] Speaker 1: nine other villagers suddenly perished after short, severe illnesses. On
[37:51] Speaker 1: their deathbeds, several victims allegedly claimed Blagojevich's ghost or corpse
[37:56] Speaker 1: had visited them at night and quite literally throttled them.
[38:03] Speaker 1: Kisilova was in fear. The villagers begged the local Austrian official,
[38:09] Speaker 1: to allow them to exhume Blagojevich's body, convinced that he
[38:13] Speaker 1: was a vampire responsible for the death. That official later
[38:18] Speaker 1: sent a report, one of the earliest uses of the
[38:21] Speaker 1: term vampire in a document, by the way, describing what
[38:24] Speaker 1: was found. Blagojevich's corpses, though ten weeks in a grave,
[38:30] Speaker 1: showed no signs of rot, with a ruddy complexion. In fact,
[38:36] Speaker 1: it almost looked alive. And the other problem was there
[38:40] Speaker 1: was fresh blood found in his mouth, as if he
[38:44] Speaker 1: had recently fed. But that was certainly proof enough for
[38:48] Speaker 1: the villagers. They staked the body through the heart, causing
[38:53] Speaker 1: more blood to flow, and then burned it to ash.
[38:57] Speaker 1: After this gruesome ritual, the deaths ceased. The Austrian authorities,
[39:02] Speaker 1: though sceptical, tolerated the exhumation as a matter of calming
[39:07] Speaker 1: public hysteria. However, news of the incident spread beyond Kisilova,
[39:14] Speaker 1: and in a matter of months, Vienna and even Paris
[39:18] Speaker 1: were buzzing with sensational rumours of actual vampires stalking the countryside.
[39:26] Speaker 1: What a time to be alive! Well, even more influential
[39:31] Speaker 1: was the case we mentioned in the introduction of Arnold
[39:34] Speaker 1: Paole in Medeuna, Spain. I mean Serbia, sorry. Now, Arnold
[39:40] Speaker 1: Paole was a Serbian ex-soldier who died around 1726 after
[39:45] Speaker 1: a fall from a hay wagon by local law. Fowler
[39:49] Speaker 1: himself had once been attacked by a vampire while living
[39:53] Speaker 1: in Turkish Serbia, and he had taken prophylactic measures, smearing
[39:59] Speaker 1: himself with vampiric blood and eating dirt from the vampire's grave,
[40:03] Speaker 1: a folk remedy to prevent becoming one. But despite this,
[40:08] Speaker 1: within weeks of Fowler's burial, villagers reportedly started seeing his
[40:14] Speaker 1: apparition and then falling ill after encounters. Four people died,
[40:20] Speaker 1: allegedly from his predation. So the villagers took action. About
[40:27] Speaker 1: forty days after Fowler's funeral, they exhumed him. And, well,
[40:32] Speaker 1: it was the classic vampire lore come to life. Fowler's
[40:36] Speaker 1: body was whole and undecayed. Fresh blood had flowed from
[40:41] Speaker 1: his eyes, nose, mouth and ears. and knew healthy skin
[40:46] Speaker 1: and nails had grown to replace the old ones that
[40:49] Speaker 1: sloughed off. Concluding that he was indeed a vampire, they
[40:55] Speaker 1: followed the old custom. Steak through the heart. Nothing beats
[41:00] Speaker 1: the steak through the heart. According to the later report,
[41:04] Speaker 1: the corpse reacted with a horrible groan and gushed out blood,
[41:09] Speaker 1: and if that wasn't a confirmation of guilt, nothing else
[41:12] Speaker 1: would have been. The villagers then burned the body to ashes,
[41:16] Speaker 1: and also executed the same procedure on four people he
[41:20] Speaker 1: is said to have killed, fearing that those victims would
[41:24] Speaker 1: rise as vampires themselves. And for a time, at least,
[41:29] Speaker 1: the village was at peace. However, vampire hysteria returned to
[41:37] Speaker 1: Medveda with a vengeance a few years later, in 1731-32.
[41:44] Speaker 1: A strange illness struck, perhaps seventeen people over three months,
[41:50] Speaker 1: young and old alike, often just after a short bout
[41:53] Speaker 1: of weakness. Panicked villagers suspected that some of those who
[41:57] Speaker 1: died in the previous vampire scare had not been properly
[42:00] Speaker 1: dealt with, or they had unknowingly eaten meat from animals
[42:06] Speaker 1: that Paola had vampirized. One rumor was that Paola had
[42:09] Speaker 1: attacked some cattle whose meat then infected people. sort of
[42:14] Speaker 1: like a vampire contagion theory. Now, the Austrian authorities, alarmed
[42:20] Speaker 1: at the reports, dispatched an investigative team, including a surgeon
[42:25] Speaker 1: major named Johannes Flukinger. In early 1732, Flukinger and fellow
[42:32] Speaker 1: officers systematically opened the graves of everyone who had died recently,
[42:36] Speaker 1: and what they recorded reads like a medical thriller. in
[42:43] Speaker 1: his report, titled Visum et Repertum, Seen and Discovered, Flukinger
[42:49] Speaker 1: notes case by case the condition of each corpse. Many
[42:53] Speaker 1: were nothing but skeletons, clearly not vampires. But shockingly, several
[42:59] Speaker 1: were in a state that to the investigators defied natural explanation.
[43:05] Speaker 1: One woman who had died two months prior was found
[43:07] Speaker 1: with a completely fresh-looking body, pliable limbs, and fresh blood
[43:13] Speaker 1: in her chest and organs upon autopsy. Another supposed victim,
[43:17] Speaker 1: dead for more than ninety days, was similarly undecomposed, with
[43:21] Speaker 1: liquid blood inside. But the most hair-raising find was a
[43:26] Speaker 1: twenty-year-old woman who had died in childbirth, and had been
[43:30] Speaker 1: buried for two months. Not only was her body intact
[43:33] Speaker 1: and full of fluid blood, but new skin and nails
[43:38] Speaker 1: had grown. classic signs of true vampirism. In total, Flukinger
[43:45] Speaker 1: identified eleven corpses that fit the vampire profile, including a child.
[43:51] Speaker 1: Under the supervision of the commission, each of these bodies
[43:54] Speaker 1: had a stake driven through the heart. In several cases,
[43:57] Speaker 1: the corpse reportedly let out that classic groan and bled
[44:01] Speaker 1: freshly at the act, and then they were all burned alive.
[44:06] Speaker 1: Those deemed non-vampiric were reburied with full rights. The case
[44:11] Speaker 1: of Medvedev thus ended with an official seal of approval
[44:17] Speaker 1: on a vampire hunt. Flückinger' s work was sent up the
[44:21] Speaker 1: chain of command, eventually published in the Vienna newspaper, and
[44:27] Speaker 1: soon reprinted across Europe. And that was then the word vampire,
[44:32] Speaker 1: or at least vampire with a Y. entered the common
[44:37] Speaker 1: lexicon through these sensational publications. Enlightenment-era readers from clergy all
[44:43] Speaker 1: the way to Voltaire were astonished that learned officers and
[44:47] Speaker 1: surgeons were seriously entertaining the existence of the undead. But
[44:53] Speaker 1: they were. So bad luck. Thus, through the 1720s and 1730s,
[45:02] Speaker 1: The vampire epidemic in Southeastern Europe became a subject of
[45:07] Speaker 1: pretty hot discussion. For the first time, vampire hysteria had
[45:13] Speaker 1: become international. Western European skeptics scoffed at these barbaric tales
[45:18] Speaker 1: from the East. Yet, the very fact that formal reports
[45:23] Speaker 1: existed gave the stories a kind of strange credibility. Governments
[45:29] Speaker 1: and scholars began weighing in, In 1732, the same year
[45:35] Speaker 1: Fluginger's report made waves, the word vampire appeared in an
[45:39] Speaker 1: English publication for the first time, and the French learned
[45:45] Speaker 1: journal Le Mercure Gallant ran an article about vampires. Some
[45:50] Speaker 1: theologians considered whether vampires might be revenant souls with God's permission,
[45:56] Speaker 1: or demonic entities reanimating corpses. Physicians conjectured about unknown diseases
[46:03] Speaker 1: that could preserve corpses or create a death-like trance. The
[46:08] Speaker 1: phenomenon even reached Empress Maria Theresa of Austria, who later,
[46:13] Speaker 1: in the 1750s, tasked her personal physician, Gerard van Swetten,
[46:19] Speaker 1: with investigating the vampire claims. Van Swetten, a rigorous Enlightenment thinker,
[46:26] Speaker 1: visited Moravia to examine vampire folklore and found it to
[46:31] Speaker 1: be completely baseless. In a report titled Vampirismus, 1755, he
[46:38] Speaker 1: explained away vampires as natural decomposition misunderstood by the ignorant.
[46:45] Speaker 1: He noted, for example, that in certain soil conditions, a
[46:48] Speaker 1: corpse might not decay as expected, or that a staked
[46:52] Speaker 1: body can emit groaning sounds due to gases. all normal,
[46:57] Speaker 1: if unpleasant, biological processes. Based on his debunking, Maria Theresa
[47:05] Speaker 1: issued decrees prohibiting the opening of graves or mutilation of
[47:08] Speaker 1: bodies for vampire beliefs, and that essentially outlawed vampire hunting
[47:15] Speaker 1: in the Habsburg realms, putting a top-down end to the
[47:20] Speaker 1: official vampire epidemic. Well, surprise, surprise, from then on, Further
[47:26] Speaker 1: cases in the region diminished markedly, or at least in
[47:31] Speaker 1: the official record they did. Nevertheless, around the same 18th
[47:36] Speaker 1: century period, vampire panics were occurring elsewhere. In neighbouring Poland,
[47:43] Speaker 1: for instance, documents from the 1690s to 1750s describe outbreaks
[47:49] Speaker 1: of fear over the upior wapiers, the Polish terms for vampire.
[47:56] Speaker 1: One case in 1749, in a Polish town, saw a
[48:00] Speaker 1: whole family exhumed and burned by neighbors who believed them
[48:05] Speaker 1: to be rising from the grave. Such incidents were common
[48:09] Speaker 1: enough that the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth's authorities at times issued edicts
[48:14] Speaker 1: similar to Maria Teresa's, discouraging superstitious burials or grave violations.
[48:21] Speaker 1: Prussia and Russia also had their share of vampire scares
[48:25] Speaker 1: in frontier areas acquired from Poland or the Ottoman Empire,
[48:31] Speaker 1: where Western officials encountered entrenched local vampire traditions. In the
[48:38] Speaker 1: Greek islands under Ottoman rule, belief in the revenant was
[48:42] Speaker 1: strong enough through the 17th and 18th centuries. One fascinating
[48:46] Speaker 1: account comes from a French traveller, Joseph Pidon de Tournefort,
[48:51] Speaker 1: who visited the island of Mykonos in 1700. So jealous,
[48:56] Speaker 1: I want to visit the island of Mykonos. Sorry, back
[49:00] Speaker 1: to it. Tournefort, a botanist by trade, found the island
[49:05] Speaker 1: in the grip of what we would call today a
[49:08] Speaker 1: mass hysteria. An unpopular villager had been murdered, and soon
[49:14] Speaker 1: after his burial, unexplained things swept Mykonos. People claimed the
[49:20] Speaker 1: dead man's spirit was knocking things over, assaulting people at night,
[49:26] Speaker 1: and even drinking wine from unattended bottles. While the populace,
[49:32] Speaker 1: convinced that the corpse was to blame, exhumed it, a
[49:36] Speaker 1: butcher was tasked with cutting out the heart to banish
[49:38] Speaker 1: the demon inside. Tonifort was an eyewitness. He recounts in
[49:43] Speaker 1: his journals how the butcher, clumsy and unnerved, hacked away,
[49:46] Speaker 1: how the stench of the corpse mixed with incense smoke
[49:51] Speaker 1: caused onlookers to faint or imagine the corpse moving. The
[49:56] Speaker 1: butcher finally extracted and burned the heart, but to no avail.
[49:59] Speaker 1: The chaos on the island continued for days, with frightened
[50:03] Speaker 1: townsfolk still shouting that the vampire was marauding each night.
[50:11] Speaker 1: Tornafort sceptically observed the panic and imagination were at work,
[50:18] Speaker 1: what he called an epidemical disease of the mind. Eventually,
[50:22] Speaker 1: on the first day of the new year, the Maconians
[50:25] Speaker 1: performed the last resort. They carried the corpse to the
[50:28] Speaker 1: seashore and burned it entirely to ashes in a massive bonfire.
[50:33] Speaker 1: Only then did collective calm return. Tornafort's published account of
[50:38] Speaker 1: this incident in A Voyage into the Levant in 1718
[50:43] Speaker 1: offers a rare outsider's view of a vampire hunt in progress.
[50:48] Speaker 1: He notes wryly that while he and a few other
[50:51] Speaker 1: Europeans tried to suggest rational causes, perhaps vandals or a
[50:56] Speaker 1: wild animal causing the damage, the locals would not hear it.
[51:01] Speaker 1: To them, the more evidence you presented them to the contrary,
[51:05] Speaker 1: the more they believed the supernatural explanations. Well, this shows
[51:11] Speaker 1: how in early modern times the educated elite often stood
[51:14] Speaker 1: apart from the rural folk on matters of the supernatural.
[51:18] Speaker 1: The rural folk, when frightened, fell back on those traditional cures, stakes,
[51:24] Speaker 1: fire and prayer. Whereas the emerging Enlightenment viewpoint sought more
[51:30] Speaker 1: natural explanations. Despite Enlightenment scepticism, vampire hysteria did not vanish overnight.
[51:39] Speaker 1: As late as the 19th century, there were isolated flurries.
[51:43] Speaker 1: For example, in New England of the USA in the 1800s,
[51:46] Speaker 1: families exhumed and ritually killed deceased relatives suspected of causing
[51:51] Speaker 1: a wasting illness, which we now know to be tuberculosis.
[51:56] Speaker 1: The famous case of Mercy Brown in Rhode Island in
[52:00] Speaker 1: 1892 is a small echo of the earlier European panics.
[52:05] Speaker 1: The locals removed Mercy's heart and burned it believing she
[52:09] Speaker 1: was siphoning life from her sick brother. Cases like that
[52:14] Speaker 1: show that vampire folklore travelled with immigrants, and in times
[52:18] Speaker 1: of crisis, communities might still revert to those old beliefs. However,
[52:25] Speaker 1: by the end of the 18th century in Europe, official
[52:28] Speaker 1: belief in vampires had largely been stamped out by science
[52:31] Speaker 1: and enlightenment thought. Interestingly, just as genuine fear waned, the
[52:36] Speaker 1: literary vampire was born. soon to flourish in novels, poems
[52:41] Speaker 1: and plays. The early modern vampire hysteria, with all its
[52:46] Speaker 1: gripping graveyard drama, became the seed of inspiration for gothic writers.
[52:53] Speaker 1: And I love it. I can't get enough of it,
[52:55] Speaker 1: to be honest. Years and years ago, I used to
[52:58] Speaker 1: read those Anne Rice novels. They really were fantastic. There
[53:04] Speaker 1: were a few weird ones, but they're pretty solid. All
[53:09] Speaker 1: in all. Well, before concluding, it's worth highlighting how different
[53:18] Speaker 1: cultures outside of Europe in the early modern era also
[53:22] Speaker 1: had their vampire-like scares and practices. In China, during the
[53:28] Speaker 1: Qing Dynasty, 17th to 19th centuries, a concept known as
[53:32] Speaker 1: the Jiangshi gained prominence. The Jiangshi, often called the hopping
[53:39] Speaker 1: vampire in English, is a reanimated cause that sustains itself
[53:43] Speaker 1: by drinking the life force or the qi of the living.
[53:46] Speaker 1: While it's not typically depicted sucking blood at the neck
[53:51] Speaker 1: as the European vampire does, it is similar to a
[53:54] Speaker 1: deadly undead being. Qing scholars like Ji Shaolan in the
[54:01] Speaker 1: 18th century wrote of Jiangshi cases almost analytically, classifying the
[54:06] Speaker 1: possible causes for a corpse to reanimate, ranging from improper
[54:10] Speaker 1: burial to sorcery. Folk traditions in China describe how a
[54:15] Speaker 1: black cat jumping over a corpse or a violent death
[54:18] Speaker 1: could create a Jiangshi. Just as European villagers employed garlic
[54:23] Speaker 1: and steaks, Chinese villagers had their own apotropaics. Peach wood,
[54:29] Speaker 1: believed to repel evil. Mirrors, a Jiangshi said to fear
[54:34] Speaker 1: its own reflection. and Taoist talismans struck on the corpse's
[54:39] Speaker 1: forehead to immobilize it. Some accounts from rural Qing-era China
[54:45] Speaker 1: tell of families frantically calling a Taoist priest to subdue
[54:48] Speaker 1: a corpse that would not lie still, a scenario very
[54:52] Speaker 1: akin to a vampire scare. And just as Europeans had
[54:56] Speaker 1: their fictional Dracula, the Chinese told their own tales. The
[55:01] Speaker 1: writer Pu Songling in the 18th century included stories that
[55:05] Speaker 1: have animated corpses in his famous ghost story collection, Strange
[55:09] Speaker 1: Tales from a Chinese Studio. One tale involves a corpse
[55:13] Speaker 1: that rises each night until a brave passerby quells it
[55:17] Speaker 1: with ritual magic. That's certainly a clear parallel. And in
[55:24] Speaker 1: the Malay world, Malaysia, Indonesia, along with the Philippines, early
[55:29] Speaker 1: modern folklore also features truly terrifying vampiric creatures. The Penanggalan
[55:35] Speaker 1: in Malay legend is a female witch who by night
[55:39] Speaker 1: detaches her head from her body and flies through the
[55:42] Speaker 1: air with her trailing viscera glowing to suck the blood
[55:47] Speaker 1: of infants and pregnant women. Communities in what is now
[55:51] Speaker 1: Malaysia and Indonesia long believed in such beings. Even into
[55:55] Speaker 1: the 19th century there are reports of towns organizing watch
[55:58] Speaker 1: patrols to guard maternity huts from attacks. Similar beings like
[56:04] Speaker 1: the Mananggal in the Philippines and the Langsuir in Malaya
[56:09] Speaker 1: struck fear through reported sightings or attacks, inciting villagers to
[56:13] Speaker 1: stick thorns on their roofs or keep lights burning all
[56:16] Speaker 1: night as deterrents. The fact that these creatures were taken seriously,
[56:20] Speaker 1: and not merely just as a scary little tale, shows
[56:25] Speaker 1: that vampire hysteria was certainly not limited to Europe. It
[56:30] Speaker 1: manifested in different guises all over the world, When in Africa,
[56:36] Speaker 1: as mentioned earlier, tribes such as the Ashanti had legends
[56:41] Speaker 1: of the Asan bosam, a creature with iron teeth hanging
[56:44] Speaker 1: in trees, while we have documentations of less outright panics,
[56:52] Speaker 1: it is known that communities took measures to appease or
[56:55] Speaker 1: avoid such beings, suggesting a real fear in daily life
[56:59] Speaker 1: of encountering one. And in South Asia, Practitioners of certain
[57:04] Speaker 1: folk rituals would try to pin down the bodies of
[57:07] Speaker 1: suspected pisachos or vampires with nails and burn-specific herbs to
[57:12] Speaker 1: cleanse the area, again indicating active steps against the undead. Well,
[57:22] Speaker 1: in any case, by the early modern period's close, a
[57:26] Speaker 1: fascinating convergence had occurred. Educated society, had largely concluded that
[57:32] Speaker 1: vampires were not real, or at least something just not
[57:37] Speaker 1: to worry about, while the myth itself had never been
[57:41] Speaker 1: more famous. In the 19th century, as many dreadfuls and
[57:46] Speaker 1: gothic horror novels picked up the theme, the vampire permanently
[57:51] Speaker 1: sunk itself into popular culture. But crucially, these fictional vampires
[57:56] Speaker 1: came from somewhere real, there were stylized echoes of the
[58:01] Speaker 1: very real historical beliefs in hysteria that people had journeyed
[58:06] Speaker 1: through in earlier times. So, looking back over a millennia
[58:13] Speaker 1: of vampire hysteria, I'm sure you'll agree it's a pretty
[58:17] Speaker 1: remarkable journey. What began as murmurings of demons in ancient
[58:21] Speaker 1: deserts and incantations whispered under oil lamps eventually grew into
[58:26] Speaker 1: full-blown frenzies. while under the glare of Enlightenment reason. Vampires,
[58:33] Speaker 1: or often the fear of them, have proven to be
[58:36] Speaker 1: a global constant in human society, cropping up in different
[58:40] Speaker 1: forms wherever people sought explanations for the dreaded unknowns of death,
[58:45] Speaker 1: disease and decay. What is particularly striking is how seriously
[58:51] Speaker 1: these phenomena were taken in their time. Of course, it's
[58:54] Speaker 1: easy for us, with modern science and a comfortable distance,
[58:58] Speaker 1: to sort of chuckle at villagers trying to kill a corpse, sure,
[59:02] Speaker 1: but to them it was deadly serious, a matter of
[59:05] Speaker 1: survival and spiritual safety. When William of Newburgh wrote, I
[59:10] Speaker 1: report these matters as a warning to posterity, he meant it.
[59:15] Speaker 1: He believed that later generations should learn and be vigilant,
[59:19] Speaker 1: and indeed posterity, even up to the 18th century, did
[59:22] Speaker 1: continue to act on those warnings. It took the rise
[59:27] Speaker 1: of scientific rationalism, to finally reframe vampires of superstition rather
[59:33] Speaker 1: than threat. Enlightenment critics like Van Suyten and Diderot in
[59:37] Speaker 1: the 1700s started to use the word vampire mockingly to
[59:42] Speaker 1: mean anybody who preyed on the gullibility of others. In
[59:46] Speaker 1: a sense, by disarming the vampire of its reality, they
[59:50] Speaker 1: killed it as surely as any stake through the heart
[59:53] Speaker 1: would have. Or did they? The later part of the
[59:58] Speaker 1: early modern period saw the vampire reborn, stronger than ever,
[1:00:03] Speaker 1: but not as a dreaded reanimated corpse in a small
[1:00:06] Speaker 1: little village, but as a main character in a poem,
[1:00:10] Speaker 1: and then a novel, and then a stage play. By
[1:00:15] Speaker 1: the 19th century, the vampire had been kind of rehabilitated
[1:00:20] Speaker 1: into a kind of dark romantic state. That evolution, however,
[1:00:26] Speaker 1: still carried the DNA of these historical accounts. Bram Stoker's
[1:00:30] Speaker 1: Dracula of 1897, for example, drew on the Transylvanian folklore
[1:00:35] Speaker 1: and the scholarly works of Calmet and others. The tools
[1:00:39] Speaker 1: Van Helsing uses in Dracula, garlic crucifix steak, come straight
[1:00:44] Speaker 1: from the pages of history that we turned here. And
[1:00:47] Speaker 1: thus the legacy of the vampire panic lived on, transmuted
[1:00:52] Speaker 1: from oral law. and village rituals, into the written lore
[1:00:56] Speaker 1: of literature, and eventually the visuals of film. Ultimately, vampire
[1:01:03] Speaker 1: hysteria throughout history reveals a paradox of human nature. On
[1:01:07] Speaker 1: one hand, it's a testament to superstition and the macabre
[1:01:10] Speaker 1: extremes of fear. The exhumations, stakings, and burnings paint a
[1:01:14] Speaker 1: grim portrait of panic. But on the other hand, it's
[1:01:17] Speaker 1: a story of communities coming together to confront the unknown,
[1:01:21] Speaker 1: using all the best knowledge they had, be it magic
[1:01:24] Speaker 1: or medicine, to just try to protect one another. In
[1:01:28] Speaker 1: those terrified villagers hacking at a corpse, we see both
[1:01:32] Speaker 1: the darkness of ignorance, but also the spark of survival instinct.
[1:01:39] Speaker 1: And so, the lecture draws to a close for today.
[1:01:43] Speaker 1: We've toured the crypts of history, seen what lurks in
[1:01:47] Speaker 1: the shadows. Thankfully, in our age, We can enjoy vampires
[1:01:53] Speaker 1: as fiction, not fact. We don't have to look over
[1:01:56] Speaker 1: our shoulder so much. But the next time you read
[1:01:59] Speaker 1: a vampire novel or watch a vampire film, remember that
[1:02:04] Speaker 1: behind the glamour and fantasy lies a very long and
[1:02:08] Speaker 1: twisting tale of real human fear and very real actions.
[1:02:14] Speaker 1: The vampires of history were not suave counts in capes.
[1:02:18] Speaker 1: They were shrouded corpses in village churchyards and for those
[1:02:23] Speaker 1: who believed in them, they were utterly terrifying, in the
[1:02:28] Speaker 1: truest sense. And that's it from me today. Did you
[1:02:35] Speaker 1: enjoy it? I hope you did. Well, I'm going to
[1:02:39] Speaker 1: thank my top dear patrons and supporters, Doug, Kimberly, Christine,
[1:02:43] Speaker 1: Sally Ember, Susan, Cameron, Logitmus, Gary, Charlene, Lynn, Therese, Katiana, Ulf, Edneer, Nicholas, Alexander, Charles, Christine, Dr. Neuronerd,
[1:02:53] Speaker 1: Thank you so much. And I will see you next time.
[1:02:57] Speaker 1: If you've enjoyed the video, like and subscribe. Consider supporting
[1:03:02] Speaker 1: on the Patreon. And good night. Lots of love to
[1:03:05] Speaker 1: you all.

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