Mutilated corpses and undead mothers-in-law: vampire epidemics through history

Welcome to the History Extra podcast, fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History magazine. Fears of the undead rising from their graves to cause trouble have occurred in societies across the globe and over history. But why was your mother-in-law? especially likely to become a vampire. What makes Count Dracula a highly unusual bloodsucker?

And how would you best mutilate a vampire's corpse to neutralize the threat they posed? Well Professor John Blair has looked at humanity's long history of vampire beliefs for his book Killing the Dead, and I spoke to him to find out more. Let's start, I think, with the title of your book, Killing the Dead: Vampire Epidemics from Mesopotamia to the New World. So what do we mean when we're talking about vampire epidemics? This is not a book about ghosts, that's the first thing I want to say.

It's a book about corpses. It's the belief that corpses are animated after death in one way or another. So They may be walking around, they may be getting at climbing out of their graves and and walking around, or they may be lying in their graves, but exerting some evil influence, which causes harm to people in one way or another. But the crucial thing is people believe that the actual corpse is has still got some sort of life or power inside it.

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