John Blair, "Killing the Dead: Vampire Epidemics from Mesopotamia to the New World" (Princeton UP, 2025)

Oct 30, 2025

John Blair, a medieval historian and author, delves into the eerie world of vampire epidemics in his new book. He discusses how beliefs about dangerous corpses span cultures from Mesopotamia to modern Haiti. Blair explores the social crises that trigger fears of animated corpses and links these phenomena to witch hunts. He investigates the psychological and cultural contexts that give rise to such beliefs and even traces the evolution of vampire lore in Europe. His insights reveal the timeless fear of the dead that still influences society today.

Ask episode

AI Snips

Chapters

Books

Transcript

Episode notes

INSIGHT

From Local Case To Global Pattern

John Blair traced his interest from a 12th-century English text describing exhumed walking corpses to a global comparative study.
He found striking parallels across times and places that suggested transmission and epidemic patterns of corpse beliefs.

INSIGHT

Mobile Corpses, Not Ghosts

Blair defined the topic narrowly as beliefs in mobile corpses, not ghosts or spirits.
He mapped a broad 'Vampire Corridor' across Europe and into Asia showing geographic patterns of those beliefs over centuries.

INSIGHT

Two Drivers Of Corpse Belief

Two broad conditions propel dangerous-corpse beliefs: shamanic-style spirit worlds and social crises.
Crises make communities seek scapegoats they can physically identify and attack, unlike ghosts.

Get the Snipd Podcast app to discover more snips from this episode

Get the app

Killing the Dead: Vampire Epidemics from Mesopotamia to the New World (Princeton UP, 2025) by Professor John Blair provides the first in-depth, global account of one of the world’s most widespread yet misunderstood forms of mass hysteria—the vampire epidemic. In a spellbinding narrative, Dr. Blair takes readers from ancient Mesopotamia to present-day Haiti to explore a macabre frontier of life and death where corpses are believed to wander or do harm from the grave, and where the vampire is a physical expression of society’s inexplicable terrors and anxieties.
In 1732, the British public opened their morning papers to read of lurid happenings in eastern Europe. Serbian villagers had dug up several corpses and had found them to be undecayed and bloated with blood. Recognizing the marks of vampirism, they mutilated and burned them. Centuries earlier, the English themselves engaged in the same behavior. In fact, vampire epidemics have flared up throughout history—in ancient Assyria, China, and Rome, medieval and early modern Europe, and the Americas. Blair blends the latest findings in archaeology, anthropology, and psychology with vampire lore from literature and popular culture to show how these episodes occur at traumatic moments in societies that upend all sense of security, and how the European vampire is just one species in a larger family of predatory supernatural entities that includes the female flying demons of Southeast Asia and the lustful yoginīs of India.
Richly illustrated, Killing the Dead provocatively argues that corpse-killing, far from being pathological or unhealthy, served as a therapeutic and largely harmless outlet for fear, hatred, and paranoia that would otherwise result in violence against marginalized groups and individuals.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network