In the summer of 1725, a provincial administrator for the Austrian army in a corner of Serbia the empire had owned for about seven years wrote to his superiors to explain why he had stood in a village churchyard and watched the people of Kiselova drive a stake through a farmer named Peter Plogojovitz, and why the farmer had bled when they did it. The letter was careful. The people, he wrote, were beside themselves with fear. He could not have stopped them.

He ended by asking that no blame fall on him. Ten weeks before that letter, Plogojovitz had died and been buried. Within about eight days of the burial, nine people in the village followed him. Each was sick for roughly a day, maybe a day and a night, and each said the same thing before dying.

Plogojovitz had come to them while they slept. He had lain down on top of them. He had put his hands around their throats and squeezed until they woke up choking, and after that they were ill, and after that they were gone. His widow had her own account.

Her husband, she said, had walked into the house one night and asked her for his opanci, the leather peasant shoes with the curled-up toes. She gave them to him. Then she packed up and moved to another village, because she did not want to be in that house when he came back for anything else. The villagers wanted Frombald, the Orthodox priest from Gradishta, to come and stand there while they opened the grave.

Frombald told them to wait for permission from Belgrade. The villagers said no. A vampire had already emptied a village back in the Turkish days, they said, every soul in it dead, and they were not going to sit and wait for a letter while it happened to them. If he would not come, they would leave.

The whole village would pack up and walk away. So he went. They dug Plogojovitz up in front of him. Frombald’s report, printed in a Vienna newspaper on the 21st of July, described what came out of that hole.

The body was, in his words, completely fresh. The hair had grown. The beard had grown. The nails had grown.

The old skin had peeled away in places, and underneath it was new skin, pale, like the skin of a man who had never worked a field in his life. And in the mouth, he wrote, he saw fresh blood. According to the common observation of the people standing around him, this was blood Plogojovitz had sucked out of the nine. The villagers sharpened a stake, set the point on the chest, and drove it through the heart, and a great deal of completely fresh blood poured out of the ears and out of the mouth.

Frombald mentioned other wild signs, then said he would pass over them out of respect. People who study the case tend to agree on what he was too polite to put on paper. The same thing turns up in other exhumation accounts from the same century. The corpse had an erection.

Then they burned him down to ash. That report used a word, vampiri. Over the next few years, that word, spelled a dozen different ways, was going to climb out of the Serbian villages and into the newspapers of Vienna and the coffee houses of London. And once it got there, it was going to acquire a title and a castle.

But the thing Frombald watched being staked was a farmer with new fingernails. That is the creature this story is about. The corpse in the ground that would not stay a corpse, and the people who lived close enough to its grave to hear it chewing. Long before anyone in Serbia had a word for it, people in Mesopotamia were hanging things over their beds to keep something out.

Her name was Lamashtu. In the Babylonian texts, she is the daughter of Anu, the sky god, which makes her about as highborn as a demon can get. And she was thrown out of heaven for what she wanted to do. The amulets show her with a lion’s head, a donkey’s teeth, the talons of a bird, hairy and long-fingered, and on many of them she is kneeling on a donkey with a pig at one breast and a dog at the other, suckling both.

A pregnant woman in Babylon would have had that hanging near her bed. What Lamashtu did, according to the spells written to stop her, was come in through the door at night and put her hand on the belly of a pregnant woman. One text has her counting the months. She waits for the birth, and then she takes the child.

She drinks its blood. She chews the bones. She sucks the marrow. She gnaws the flesh off the arms.

The incantations are quite specific about the eating. And she was blamed for miscarriages, for stillbirths, for the fevers that took babies in their first weeks, for the mother who bled out on the birthing bricks. Every bad end that could come to a birth had her fingerprints on it. So the families fought back with objects.

They wore little plaques of her enemy, Pazuzu, another demon, a worse-looking one if anything, because apparently the only thing that frightens a demon is a bigger demon. They buried figurines of her under the threshold. There is a ritual where you set out gifts for her—a comb, a spindle, a pin, a pair of sandals, some food for a journey—and you say the words that tell her to take her things and go, to cross the river and not come back. A packed lunch for a demon.

Beside her in the same texts is a whole family of night things: the Leelu and the Lilitu, male and female wind demons that come in through windows, and one that gets closest to what this story is about, the Ardat Lili. She is the ghost of a young woman who died before she married. She never had a wedding or a child, and so she comes back for the ones the living have. She slips into the beds of young men and takes what she never got.

A woman who died with something unfinished, coming back for it. Then the plain, ordinary dead, the etimmu, older books call it the ekimmu. This is the ghost of somebody who was not buried properly, or who was buried and then forgotten, because in Mesopotamia the dead needed feeding. You poured out water for them.

You left bread. If you stopped, if the family died out or moved away or just could not be bothered, the ghost went hungry, and a hungry ghost fastened onto a living person. Sickness followed. Fever, wasting, bad dreams.

The physician’s texts list the hand of a ghost as a diagnosis alongside coughs and swellings. You could catch a dead person the way you catch a cold. Out of all this comes a name most people know, Lilith. She turns up exactly once in the Hebrew Bible, in Isaiah, chapter 34, in a passage about a land so ruined that only wild animals and night creatures live in it.

Translators have argued about what to do with the word ever since. The people who lived in Babylonia in the centuries after that were not arguing. Archaeologists working at Nippur in modern Iraq have pulled hundreds of clay bowls out of the ground under houses from roughly the fifth to the eighth century. The bowls were buried face down.

Inside each one, spiraling in from the rim, is a spell written in Aramaic, and a lot of those spells are aimed at Liliths, male and female. Keep them off the pregnant woman. Keep them away from the cradle. Some of the bowls have a picture of the demon drawn in the bottom, hair loose, arms and legs chained.

You wrote out your fear. You drew the thing. You put it in a bowl, and you trapped it under the floor of your own house. The story that made Lilith famous comes later, in a medieval Hebrew text called the Alphabet of Ben Sira.

Lilith in that version was Adam’s first wife, made from the same earth he was, and she refused to lie underneath him. She said the words that had made the world and flew off. God sent three angels after her—Senoi, Sansenoi, and Semangelof—and they caught her over the Red Sea, and she struck a bargain. She would go on killing infants.

That was her nature. But she would not touch any child protected by an amulet bearing the three angels’ names. For centuries afterward, Jewish families hung those three names in the room where a woman was giving birth. A demon that drinks a baby’s blood is a long way from a Serbian peasant with new fingernails.

But the fear underneath is one fear, and it holds for four thousand years. Something dead, or never properly alive, comes into the house at night. It goes for the sleeping and for the small. It leaves a body behind that has been drained of something, and the living answer with objects and rituals and things buried under the floor.

Across the water in Greece, the thing got a face, a pretty one. Philostratus, writing in the third century, tells a story about a young man named Menippus in the city of Corinth. Menippus was handsome and a bit vain about it. A woman appeared to him on the road out of town, foreign-looking and very rich, and told him she had loved him for a long time.

She had a house in the suburbs. She had wine and gold, and she wanted to marry him. So he went, and he would have married her, except that a philosopher called Apollonius was in Corinth at the time. When Apollonius looked at the bride, he saw something else.

He came to the wedding feast, and in front of the guests he told Menippus that the woman was an empusa. The gold plate on the tables vanished, the wine pourers vanished, the cooks vanished, and the bride, weeping, admitted what she was. She had been fattening Menippus up. Feed him, indulge him, get him soft and content, and then eat him.

She liked the bodies of young men, she said, because their blood was pure. The Greeks had a word for a woman like that, and the word was lamia. The story behind it is that Lamia had been a queen in Libya, and Zeus had loved her, and Hera destroyed every child Lamia bore. Lamia went mad with it.

She started taking other women’s children and tearing them apart. In later stories she could take the shape of a beautiful woman and go into a city looking for young men. The Romans being Romans made it a bird. The striges, a screech owl with a taste for infants.

Ovid, in his calendar poem the Fasti, book six, describes them. Big heads, staring eyes, beaks made for tearing, gray feathers, hooked claws. They fly at night, he says, and they go after children still at the breast. They pull the entrails out of babies with their beaks.

Their throats are full of the blood they have drunk. Then he tells you about a particular baby, a boy called Proca, five days old, a king’s son, asleep in his cradle, and the striges get in. His nurse comes in the morning and finds his cheeks torn open and his skin gone the color of a dead leaf. The nymph Carmenta is called in, and what she does to save him is to set a piglet’s entrails out on the roof in the child’s place.

A trade. Take these instead. And she puts a branch of whitethorn, hawthorn, in the window. Sixteen hundred years later, a village in Istria is going to try to drive a hawthorn stake through a dead man’s chest, and the hawthorn is going to bounce off.

The word striges goes east and turns into strigoi, which is what the Romanians still call the dead who walk. A screech owl and a Romanian corpse have the same grandmother. The Romans also fed their dead the way the Babylonians had, and for the same reason. Every May, on three nights, the head of a household got up at midnight and walked barefoot through the house with his thumb pressed between his fingers, making the sign against the evil eye, and threw black beans over his shoulder without looking back, saying nine times, with these I redeem me and mine.

The beans were for the lemures, the hungry dead of the family, the ones who had died badly or been forgotten. A household that skipped the Lemuria would find out what a lemur did when it had not been fed. Now a story from a Greek town with no monster in it at all, just a dead girl and a young man who loved her. The writer is Phlegon of Tralles, who worked for the Emperor Hadrian in the second century and collected marvels.

In the town of Amphipolis in northern Greece, a young man named Machates was staying as a guest in the house of a man called Demostratus and his wife Charito. At night a girl came to his room. She came several nights running. She was young and quiet, and she got into his bed, and they slept together, and they exchanged gifts the way lovers do.

She gave him a gold ring and a breastband. He gave her an iron ring and a gilded cup. The house had an old nurse, and the nurse was awake one night with a lamp, and she looked into the guest room and saw the girl in bed with Machates. And the nurse knew the girl.

The nurse had raised her. It was Philinnion, the daughter of the house. And Philinnion had been dead six months. The nurse woke the parents.

Charito came to the door with a lamp and looked, and then she could not make herself go in, and they waited till morning, and the girl had gone. The next night she came again, and this time the mother and father burst into the room, and Philinnion sat up in the bed and turned on them. She was angry. She told her mother and father that they had spoiled it, that she had come with the permission of the gods below, that she had been allowed three days with the man she had wanted, and now, because of their curiosity, they had cut it short.

Then she lay back down on the bed, and she was dead again, a corpse in her lover’s bed. They went to the family vault. Philinnion’s bier was empty. Lying on it were an iron ring and a gilded cup.

The whole town got involved after that. They held an assembly, argued about what to do with the body, and in the end carried it outside the walls and burned it, and made sacrifices to the gods of the underworld and to the god of travelers to make sure she stayed where she had been sent. Machates killed himself. Fifteen hundred years later, Goethe turned that story into a poem called The Bride of Corinth, and in his version the dead girl says out loud what Phlegon only implies.

She has come back to drink the blood from her lover’s heart, and she is going to move on to other young men after him. The poem was scandalous in 1797, and literary historians count it among the reasons the vampire arrived in literature as a lover rather than a farmer. But the girl at Amphipolis never says a word about blood. She says she was given three days.

That is all she wanted. A quick swing east. The walking corpse is not a European invention, and the versions elsewhere are, if anything, worse. The Chinese have the jiangshi.

The word means stiff corpse. It hops. That sounds ridiculous until you understand why, and then it does not. Rigor mortis locks the limbs so the dead man cannot bend his knees or his elbows, so he moves by hopping with his arms stuck straight out in front of him.

In most of the older stories, what he wants is qi, the life force, and he drains it from the living by getting close to them, by breathing on them. The remedies are all about stopping the body. Sticky rice draws out the corpse poison. A mirror shows the thing what it is.

A sword made of peach wood, a yellow paper talisman written in a Taoist priest’s hand and slapped on the forehead, which freezes it where it stands. Behind the folklore there is a real trade, in the mountains of western Hunan, called driving corpses. Migrant workers died a long way from home, and Chinese custom wanted a man buried in his own village. There were men who, for a fee, would walk the dead home.

The stories say they walked them at night in a line on a rope, with a bell going in front to warn the living off the road. Whether they carried the bodies on poles under a cloth, or whether they did something else, is one of those questions best left alone. India has the vetala, a spirit that lives in charnel grounds and gets into corpses and animates them. The famous cycle of stories, the Twenty-Five Tales of the Vetala, has a king, Vikramaditya, going into a cremation ground at night to cut a corpse down from a tree, and the corpse tells him riddles, and every time the king answers, the corpse flies back up into the tree and he has to start again.

The nastier one is the churel in the north of India and in what is now Pakistan. She is the ghost of a woman who died in childbirth, or during her period, or in the days after a birth, unclean by the rules of the time and unfinished, and she comes back. Her feet are on backwards. She appears as a beautiful girl to young men on lonely roads and takes them, and every man she takes ages.

She drains the youth out of him. He comes home an old man with white hair and no strength in his legs, and he dies. Families buried women who died in childbirth face down with the ankles shackled with thorns in the grave, to keep them from getting up. The Babylonians had the same fear about the same death, three thousand years and two thousand miles away.

And the Philippines have the manananggal. She looks like a woman in the daytime. At night, she goes to a private place and splits herself at the waist. The top half grows bat wings and flies.

The bottom half stays behind, standing on its own, the intestines hanging out where the body came apart, and the top half goes hunting. She lands on the roof of a house where a pregnant woman is sleeping, and she puts down a tongue through the thatch, a tongue as thin as a thread and as long as it needs to be, and pushes it into the sleeping woman’s belly and sucks out the heart of the unborn child. In the morning, there is a woman with a dead thing inside her and no mark on her skin. The way to kill a manananggal is to find the bottom half while she is out.

You rub salt into the open waist, or garlic, or ash, and then the top half cannot rejoin, and when the sun comes up, she dies in the air. Every one of these creatures is a way of explaining a death that nobody could explain. A child who was fine at bedtime and cold by morning. A pregnancy that ended in blood.

And every one of them arrives at one answer. Something dead has been at them, and the response follows from that. Find the body and do something to it. The church had already tried to stop it.

A bishop of Worms called Burchard put together a handbook for confessors around the year 1010, a long list of sins and the penances that went with them. Somewhere in the middle of it, between the questions about adultery and the questions about eating meat on a Friday, there is a question for women. Have you done what some women do, he asks, when a child dies unbaptized? Have you taken the little body and put it in a secret place and driven a stake through it, saying that if you did not, it would rise up and do harm to many?

Two years of penance is his answer. There is another question right beside it about a woman who dies in labor with the child still inside her, and the women who drive a stake through the mother and the child together in the grave. The confessors of the eleventh century were asking their parishioners about it. The questions would not be in the book if nobody was answering yes.

Eighty years after Burchard, a group of monks in the English Midlands did exactly that to two runaway peasants. The man who wrote it down was Geoffrey, abbot of Burton in Staffordshire. He took over the abbey in 1114, and at some point after that he wrote a life of the abbey’s saint, Modwenna, and stuffed it with miracles, and in chapter 47 he put in something that had happened at Burton about twenty years before he arrived. He is careful to say the old monks told him, and careful about the dates.

What follows is a story that, if you strip the saint out of it, is a plague outbreak in a small village and what those people did about it. Two peasants belonging to the abbey, from a place called Stapenhill, ran away. They went to the next village over, Drakelow, which belonged to a Norman lord called Roger the Poitevin, and asked him to take them on. Roger did, and when the abbot complained, Roger’s men went and raided the abbey’s fields, and the abbot’s knights rode out and beat them, and it all got quite feudal.

The day after the fight, the two runaways sat down to eat, third hour of the day, Geoffrey says, mid-morning, and they both dropped dead at the table, just like that. Healthy the day before, dead over their food at the same moment. They were buried at Stapenhill in wooden coffins, and that evening they were back at Drakelow. Geoffrey says people saw them walking with their coffins on their shoulders.

All night they went up and down the fields and the lanes of the village, sometimes as men carrying their own coffins, sometimes in the shape of bears, sometimes dogs, sometimes other animals. They banged on the walls of the houses with their hands and they shouted. What they shouted in his Latin is something like, move quickly, move, get up, get going, come, get up, and come with us. Within a few days, the people of Drakelow started dying.

A disease went through the village. Geoffrey says it killed everybody except three. Three people left in a village. They went to the lord, and the lord went to the bishop, and the bishop gave permission, and the survivors opened the two graves.

The bodies were intact, Geoffrey says, with no sign of decay. And the linen cloths laid over the faces of the dead were, in his exact word, most hideously bloodied, stained through with blood from the mouth. So they did what you do. They cut off both heads and set them between the legs.

They cut into the chests and tore out the hearts. They carried the hearts to a crossroads that the village called Dodecross, and built a fire and burned them. Geoffrey says the fire went from morning until evening, because a heart takes a long time to burn. When the hearts finally split open, there was a loud crack, and everyone standing there saw an evil spirit fly up out of the flames in the shape of a crow.

The two survivors who had been sick got better as soon as they saw the smoke rising. Then they left. Everybody left, and Drakelow was abandoned. For four hundred years afterward, people around Burton had a saying, the devil of Drakelow.

Geoffrey never once uses the word vampire. He did not have it. About ninety years after that, Walter Map, a courtier who was clever and a gossip and wrote a book called Courtiers’ Trifles, set down a couple of Welsh border cases he had heard from people who were there. One of them came from a knight called William of Larden.

William went to Gilbert Foliot, bishop of Hereford in the 1150s, and told him there was a problem in his village. A Welshman had died there, a bad man, un-Christianly, and now he was coming back every night. He came to the houses and he called people by name, one at a time. He stood outside and called your name, and if he called your name, you got sick, and within three days you were dead.

He had been doing this for a while. William said there were not many people left. The bishop’s advice was practical. Dig him up.

Cut through the neck with a spade. Put him back with holy water over him. They did that. It did not work.

The Welshman kept coming. One night he came to William’s own door and called William’s name three times. William got his sword and went out after him. He chased the dead man all the way back to his grave, and as the corpse was getting down into it, William brought the sword down and split the head open to the neck.

That stopped it. Walter Map ends with a line that stays with a reader. He says he knows the facts of the case. He just does not know what to make of them.

His other story is smaller. A man in Worcester, again one who had died badly, was seen walking around in his burial shroud for a month or more. Someone put a cross on his grave, and he would not go near it. Then someone put the cross over the grave while he was out, and he came back and stopped short of it and stood there, and they took it away, and he lay down, and they put it back, and that was the end of him.

A dead man who could be managed with furniture. The big set of English cases comes from further north, from a man who was, by the standards of his time, quite skeptical. William of Newburgh was a canon at a small priory in Yorkshire, and in the late 1190s he wrote a history of England that modern historians think is one of the best of the period. He checked things.

He argued with other chroniclers. He thought the King Arthur stories were rubbish and said so. In book five of that history, in the middle of the wars of Richard the Lionheart, he stops and puts in four accounts of dead men getting out of their graves. He prefaces them by saying that if he wrote down every case of this sort that he had confirmed in his own lifetime, the job would be, in his words, beyond measure laborious and troublesome.

He had heard of it happening all over the country, and he was only going to give the ones he had good witnesses for. The first is from Buckinghamshire. A man died and was buried the day before Ascension. The next night he came into the bedroom where his wife was sleeping and got on top of her.

William says he nearly crushed her under the insupportable weight of his body. She survived it, and the next night she had people in the room with her, and when he came they shouted and drove him off. So he went next door. His brothers lived on the same street.

He went and lay on them. Then the animals in their pens and stalls, all night. It got to the point where every house in the village had someone sitting up armed. The dead man started coming out in daylight, walking about in the street in the afternoon, and only some people could see him and some people could not.

The clergy of the district met about it. The archdeacon, a man called Stephen, wrote to the bishop of Lincoln, and his clerks told the bishop plainly that the usual thing in England was to dig the body up and burn it. The bishop of Lincoln, a very holy and very stubborn man called Hugh, said no. He found it indecent.

Instead, he wrote out a letter of absolution, a formal pardon, and had the grave opened and the letter laid on the dead man’s chest, and the grave closed again. The man was never seen after that. Someone tried paperwork instead of a spade, and William says it worked. The second case is Berwick, up on the Scottish border, a rich man.

William makes a point of saying he was a rogue, a bad man who had done well for himself. He died, he was buried, and he got up. He walked around the town at night with a pack of dogs following him, barking. The people were terrified of him and of the air.

They thought a body walking around the streets, rotting as it went, was poisoning what they breathed. The town got together and hired ten young men known for having strong nerves. The ten young men dug him up and cut him to pieces and burned the pieces. A plague came anyway, William says, and it took a large part of the people of Berwick.

He does not say whether the people thought the burning had come too late or whether it had made things worse. He just tells you the plague came. The third is Melrose Abbey. A priest there had been chaplain to a rich lady, and he had spent his whole life riding to hounds instead of praying, which the monks disapproved of so much that they had a nickname for him, Hundeprest, the dog priest.

When he died, he did not stay in the abbey ground. He was seen at night at the lady’s house, at the door of her bedchamber, groaning and muttering. She was so frightened she went to the monks. Four of them went to sit up over his grave, two friars and two strong younger men.

Sometime after midnight, three of them decided it was too cold and went to get a fire going, leaving one man on the grave alone. The dead priest came up out of the ground and went for him. The man on watch had an axe. William says he swung it and buried it deep in the corpse’s body, and the corpse groaned out loud and turned round and went back to its tomb.

The tomb, William says, opened of its own accord to take it in and closed again over it. At first light, the other three came back and opened the grave. The body had a huge wound in it, and the coffin was full of gore, a great quantity of blood that had run out of the wound and pooled around the body in the box. They carried it outside the abbey walls and burned it and scattered the ashes on the wind.

The fourth and last is the one that people who study this period tend to think is the closest thing England has to the eighteenth-century Serbian cases. William sets it at a castle he calls Anantis, which most people take to be Alnwick in Northumberland. A man came to Alnwick from Yorkshire. He was running from something down there, and he had connections at the castle, and he settled in, and he was not a good man.

He got it into his head that his wife was unfaithful, and instead of asking her, he told her he was going away on a journey. Then he crept back into the house and climbed up into the rafters over the bedroom and lay there on a beam, waiting. He was right about her. A young man from the neighborhood came in and got into the bed, and the husband up on his beam lost his grip or his balance and came down.

He fell hard onto the floor beside the bed. He was badly hurt, and he lay dying for some days, and a priest came and told him to confess, and he put it off. Tomorrow. He would confess tomorrow.

William has a line about that. The man was fated never to see that tomorrow in this world. He was buried in the churchyard, and he came out. He walked at night, and again there was the pack of dogs barking and following him through the lanes.

People bolted their doors at sundown and did not open them for anyone. William says the air got bad. The man’s breath, the breath of a corpse, was in the streets, and people started to sicken and die of it. House after house, and the town which had been busy emptied out, some fled, most of the rest died.

William calls it a pestilence and says Alnwick was almost deserted. It ended on Palm Sunday. The priest of the place had guests for the feast, and while they were at table, two brothers whose father had died in the outbreak went to the churchyard with a spade. They meant to find the body and destroy it, and they did not even need to dig far.

William says it was barely under the surface. When they uncovered it, they found the corpse swollen up, enormously fat, the face turgid and dark red and shining with blood, and the cloth over its face torn almost to shreds. The two young men were angry as well as frightened. One of them put the edge of the spade into the body, and out of that cut came a jet of blood so big that William says it looked as if they had opened a leech that had gorged itself on many people.

Someone told them a body like that would not burn unless the heart was taken out. One of the brothers cut into the side with the blunt spade, blow after blow, until he had opened it. Then he put his hand into the corpse, into the chest, felt for the heart, and pulled it out. They tore the heart to pieces.

They dragged the body to a pyre and burned it. William says the pestilence stopped. What happens to a dead body underground comes up later, when the Austrian army surgeons start writing things down. William, for his part, had no doubt whose blood it was.

The Norse had their own version, and theirs called for a wrestler. In the Icelandic sagas, the walking dead are called draugr, and they are the physical bodies of the dead, swollen and black, with the strength of several men. They live in their burial mounds and come out to kill livestock and anyone who walks past after dark. Grettir’s Saga, written down in the fourteenth century about events around the year 1000, has the best known of them.

A farmer in the north of Iceland cannot keep a shepherd because the valley is haunted, and he hires a big, pale, strange Swede called Glamr, who does not go to church and does not care about ghosts. On Christmas Eve, Glamr goes out to the sheep and does not come back. They find him the next day up the valley on his back, blue and swollen to the size of an ox, with a trail through the snow where he has fought something and been dragged. They try to carry him to the church for burial, and the body will not go.

It gets heavier the closer they get. In the end they bury him where he lies under a heap of stones. Shortly after that, he begins to come down the valley at night and ride the roof of the farmhouse, sitting astride the ridge beam, drumming his heels on the turf until the timbers crack. The next shepherd is found dead with his neck broken and every bone in his body crushed.

Grettir, the outlaw hero of the saga, comes to deal with it. He sleeps in the hall wrapped in a cloak. In the night, the door bursts open and something has to stoop to get in. It comes down the hall and tears the cloak off him, and they wrestle.

The saga says the benches were smashed and the doorframe torn out, and that Glamr was dragging Grettir toward the door and the dark, because a draugr’s strength is greater outside. Grettir gets a foot against a stone and throws himself backward, and they go through the doorway together with Glamr underneath. The clouds part and the moon comes out, and Glamr, lying on his back in the snow, rolls his eyes up and looks at Grettir, and Grettir, who has never been afraid of anything, is afraid. Glamr curses him.

He tells him he will never be stronger than he is now, that he will be outlawed, that he will be alone, and that he will see those eyes every time he is in the dark for the rest of his life. Then Grettir cuts his head off and sets it against his buttocks, the way you finish a draugr, and burns the body and buries the ashes far from any road. The saga is honest about what the curse did. Grettir could not be alone in the dark after that.

He was afraid of it until the day he was killed. For a long time, the medieval stories were just stories. Monks wrote them, and you could believe the monks or not. In the 1960s, though, archaeologists working at an abandoned village in the Yorkshire Wolds called Wharram Percy dug a pit, a rubbish pit more or less between two of the medieval houses.

In it were 137 human bones, at least ten people, the youngest about two years old, the oldest around fifty. They dated between the eleventh and the fourteenth centuries. The bones had been treated in a way nobody at the time could explain, so they sat in a store for fifty years. In 2017, a team from Historic England and the University of Southampton went back to them.

Knife marks mostly on the skulls and the neck bones. Seventeen of the bones had been burned at low heat, a fire that had been built around bodies rather than a body thrown into a furnace. Six of the long bones, thigh bones and shin bones, had been snapped while the bone was still fresh. The first thing the team checked was cannibalism, because there had been famines in that period and starving people do eat the dead.

But when you butcher a body for meat, you cut at the big joints, the shoulder and the hip, to take the limbs off. These cuts were on the head and the throat. Nobody was eating these people. The isotopes in the teeth said they were locals.

They had grown up drinking the water of that valley. The team’s conclusion was that these bodies had been cut up and burned to stop them getting out of their graves. William of Newburgh’s Yorkshire, about forty miles from his priory, doing exactly what he said it did. The graves keep turning up once people knew what to look for.

On an island in the Venetian lagoon called Lazzaretto Nuovo in 2006, a forensic archaeologist named Matteo Borrini was working in a mass grave, plague pits. The plague of 1576 killed something like fifty thousand people in Venice, roughly a third of the city, and the bodies went to the quarantine islands by the boatload and into trenches. In one of those trenches was a woman, sixty or seventy years old, on her back, and she had a brick wedged between her jaws, forced in sideways deep enough to hold the mouth open. Borrini’s explanation goes like this.

The gravediggers on those islands were opening the same trenches over and over through the summer to add new bodies. When they opened a trench, they saw what a few weeks in a damp pit does to a corpse. The belly swells. Dark fluid comes up the throat and runs out of the mouth and nose.

The linen shroud pulled tight over the face gets soaked in that fluid and rots, so it looks as though a hole has been chewed through it from the inside, right over the mouth. To a gravedigger in 1576, a corpse that had eaten its own shroud was a known thing, a shroud-eater. And shroud-eaters spread plague to their families by chewing. The way to stop one was to take the shroud out of its mouth and put in something it could not eat.

So somebody knelt down over that old woman in a plague trench and forced a brick between her teeth. Not everyone buys this. Other archaeologists have pointed out that a corpse’s jaw drops open as it rots, and in a pit full of rubble and bone, things fall into open mouths. They found a skeleton on another quarantine island with somebody else’s thigh bone in its mouth, and nobody thinks that was a ritual.

Borrini’s team pushed back, said the brick was placed, said the position was wrong for a random fall. Poland has several recent cases. At a cemetery called Drawsko in the northwest, a team dug up about 285 skeletons between 2008 and 2012, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century, ordinary village Catholics for the most part. Six of them were different.

Five had an iron sickle laid across the body, the blade against the throat or across the belly. One woman in her thirties had it right across her neck, edge in. Others had a stone set under the chin, wedged against the jaw. When the team ran the chemistry on the teeth, all six were locals, people born there, baptized there, known by everyone in the parish, then buried with a blade at the throat.

The archaeologist who ran the study, Lesley Gregoricka, explained the sickle the way the folklore does. If the dead person sat up, the edge would take the head off. The stone under the chin kept the jaw shut so the corpse could not chew. Her team suggested these might have been the first people to die in one of the cholera epidemics that ran through Poland in the 1600s, the first case in each outbreak, the one everyone blamed.

Cholera does not mark the bones, so that stays a suggestion. In August of 2022, at a village called Pień, a professor from Toruń named Dariusz Poliński opened grave 75 in a small seventeenth-century cemetery and found a girl, maybe eighteen, maybe twenty. She had been buried in a silk cap woven with gold or silver thread, so somebody had money, or somebody loved her. A small iron triangular padlock was closed around her left big toe, and an iron sickle lay across her neck, the blade turned in toward her throat, positioned so that if she had lifted her head, the edge would have gone into her.

The excavators think the padlock and the sickle may not have gone in at the same time. One way of seeing the grave is that she was buried with the padlock, then something happened in the village and people came back to the grave and opened it and found the padlock open and put the sickle across her throat in a panic and filled the hole in. The same cemetery had a child buried face down with a padlock at its feet, face down so that if it woke it would bite into the earth and dig itself deeper instead of up. Bulgaria has a whole category of these.

The director of the National Museum told the press in 2012 that over a hundred skeletons with iron stakes through them had been found across the country, and that in some villages the practice had gone on into the early 1900s. That June, at Sozopol on the Black Sea, they found two medieval men with iron rods driven through the chest into the ground beneath them. Two years later, at a mountain fortress called Perperikon, an archaeologist found a man in his forties, thirteenth century, with an iron plowshare hammered through his chest, and his left leg had been cut off below the knee and laid in the grave next to him. Pin him down, and in case that does not hold, make sure he cannot walk.

Ireland has two men at Kiltiernan in Roscommon, eighth century, with big stones jammed into their mouths. Bohemia has a cemetery at Čelákovice found in 1966, fourteen skeletons from the tenth and eleventh centuries, some beheaded, some staked. Each of these modifications does a specific job. A stone in the mouth stops the chewing.

A sickle takes the head. A stake or a plowshare or a rod pins the body so it cannot sit up. A padlock closes the grave the way it closes a door. Face down means the corpse digs the wrong way.

Cutting off the head and putting it between the legs means that even if the body gets up, it has to go looking for its face. And burning means there is nothing left to get up. The chewing deserves its own section. For a couple of centuries in the German-speaking lands and in Pomerania and Silesia, the fear centered on a corpse that stayed in its coffin and ate.

The word is nachtzehrer, after-devourer, the one who keeps eating after death. A nachtzehrer does not leave its grave. It lies there in the coffin and it chews. First the shroud, so the shroud is found in its mouth, then its own clothes, then its own fingers, its own hands, the flesh of its own arms.

The belief, the specific mechanism, was that as it chewed, its living relatives lost strength. Every mouthful of shroud was a day of somebody’s life. A family would bury a father, and then the mother would sicken, and then a child, and then another child, and people would say, he is chewing. Go and listen at the grave.

And they did go and listen. During epidemics, when whole streets were dying, people reported hearing sounds from the churchyard at night. Smacking, grunting, a sound like a pig at a trough. The dead eating.

So they stuffed the mouth. A coin under the tongue so the corpse had something to suck on. A stone, a clod of earth, a board wedged under the chin to hold the jaw shut. They bound the jaw with cloth.

They cut the dead man’s name out of his shirt so he would not know who he was and would not know whose family to feed on. And if the deaths in a family did not stop, they opened the grave. If they found the shroud in the mouth and the lips chewed, they put a spade through the neck. The Kashubians on the Baltic coast had a variant they called the wiészczi, and they believed it could do more than chew.

Once it had eaten through its own shroud and its own flesh, it climbed out of the grave and went to the church and rang the bell, and everyone who heard the bell would die. Their answer was to bury the suspect with a net, because a wiészczi had to untie every knot in the net before it could get up, one knot a year, and a good fishing net has more knots in it than anyone has years. The learned men wrote about it. A student at Leipzig named Philipp Rohr defended a dissertation in 1679 with the title On the Chewing of the Dead, and his answer, after a great deal of Latin, was that the devil did it.

A generation later, a scholar called Michael Ranft wrote a whole book on the same subject, On the Chewing of the Dead in Their Graves, in 1725, and he went at it differently, because by then the reports from Serbia were arriving. Ranft thought the sounds were real and the chewing was not. He thought that when someone died suddenly and badly, the shock of it went into the people who had watched, they grieved and stopped sleeping, they had dreams in which the dead man came to them, and the dreaming and the not sleeping wore them down until they were ill, and then they died, and the next person in the house started dreaming. He called it a kind of inquietude, an unrest passing from the corpse to the mourners.

Whether he was describing a superstition or a contagion, he does not quite say. That is where the German side of it stood going into the 1730s. South of there, in the Slavic villages and down through the Balkans, the dead did something different. They got up and came home.

The words vary by district. Upir in the old Russian texts. Vampir among the Serbs. Vukodlak along the Adriatic, a word that also means werewolf, because the two things were never cleanly separated down there.

Strigoi and moroi in Romania. Vrykolakas in Greece. But the creature under all those names is the same one. And so is the list of people who were at risk of becoming it.

The list is long, and it says a great deal about who these communities were afraid of. Suicides first. Anyone who died by drowning or by murder or by violence of any kind. Anyone who died unbaptized or excommunicated or without the last rites, which in practice meant anyone who died suddenly a long way from a priest.

Witches and sorcerers. Anyone who had been bitten or throttled by a vampire. Children born with a caul over the face, or born with teeth already through the gums, or in some Romanian villages born with a small tail of skin at the base of the spine. A seventh son born after six brothers.

A child whose mother had been stared at by a vampire while she was carrying. Accidents counted too. A corpse laid out in the house before burial had to be watched all night, every night, by someone awake, because if a cat walked over it, or a dog, or a hen fluttered across it, or if a shadow fell on it the wrong way, the dead person would come back. Bad deaths, unfinished deaths, unlucky births.

The people who did not quite fit in life or in dying. What the vampire did once it was up was go home. It went to its own house first. It came in the door it had always used and asked for food, or it got into the bed it had slept in for thirty years, next to the woman it had slept next to, and it lay on her.

In South Slavic belief, a vampire could get a child on its widow, and that child, the dhampir, grew up with the ability to see vampires that were invisible to everyone else. The dhampirs made a living out of it. They went from village to village, paid to walk through a place and point at the thing nobody else could see and shoot it or wrestle it. There are accounts of these performances well into the twentieth century, a man in a field grappling with the air while the village watched.

And when the deaths did not stop, the village went to the churchyard. The signs they were looking for in the grave were consistent from Poland to Greece. A body that had not rotted, or not rotted enough. Skin gone dark or red.

A belly swollen tight as a drum. Hair and nails that seemed longer than they had been at the burial. Old skin sloughing off and new skin under it. Blood at the mouth.

And a body that, if you pushed on it, was soft, and if you cut it, bled. The remedies had regional flavors. The stake was the universal one, driven through the heart or through the belly or through the navel, and the wood mattered. Hawthorn in Serbia.

Ash in some Russian districts. Aspen, because aspen was the wood of the cross in some traditions and the wood Judas hanged himself from in others. In Romania they sometimes used an iron spike or a nail through the skull. The head came off with a spade or a sexton’s shovel and went between the legs, or between the feet, or was buried a long way from the body.

Garlic went into the mouth, the nostrils, the ears. Thorny branches, hawthorn or wild rose, went into the coffin so that the shroud would snag on them if the corpse tried to move. Poppy seed or millet was scattered in the grave, because a vampire was compelled to count every grain, and the dawn would catch it still counting. The tendons behind the knees and ankles were cut so it could not walk.

And when nothing else worked, the body was burned, and the ashes were gathered up and stirred into water and given to the sick to drink, on the theory that the thing that had hurt you was the only thing that could heal you. Romania went further than anyone and made the checking routine. In many villages it was the custom to open a grave a set number of years after the burial, three years for a child, five for a young person, seven for an adult. If the body had gone to bone, it was washed, wrapped, and put back with a mass said over it, and everyone went home relieved.

If it had not, if it was whole or dark or swollen or the mouth had blood at it, the family knew what they had, and the priest and the village dealt with it there and then. The Romanians also had two kinds. The strigoi mort, the dead one. And the strigoi viu, the living one, a person born with the caul or the tail or the second soul who would become a vampire at death and who, while still alive, could send that second soul out at night to drain the cattle and the neighbors while the body lay in bed.

Bulgaria bred a profession. The vampirdzhiya, the vampire hunter, was often a Saturday-born man, because a child born on a Saturday could see the things that walked. His method, the one the folklorists recorded in the nineteenth century, was a bottle. He would set out bait, blood or a favorite food, and wait with an icon and a wide-mouthed bottle.

When the vampire came for the bait, as a shadow or a mist or a smear of light, the hunter would drive it with the icon toward the bottle and cork it, then throw the bottle on a fire, and the village would hear it burst. Some of those men made a good living. A few were still working in the 1900s. Serbia kept a particular piece of those beliefs in a particular place.

On the river Rogačica in western Serbia, near the village of Zarožje, stood a watermill. The story about it was written down in 1880 by a Serbian writer named Milan Đ. Milićević, who had grown up in western Serbia and heard it from the old people. Millers who took the mill kept dying.

A man would go up to grind flour overnight and be found dead in the morning. Word went round that the mill belonged to a vampire called Sava Savanović. A young man named Strahinja, who wanted to marry a girl whose father would not have him, volunteered to spend a night in the mill to prove himself. He lit a fire, put a log in his bed under a blanket in the shape of a sleeping man, and climbed into the rafters.

Past midnight, the door opened and a thing came in with a red face, and it went to the bed and threw off the blanket and found the log. Strahinja shot it. It vanished, and he heard it moan as it went. In the morning, the village followed the old procedure.

They took a black stallion without a single white hair on it and led it through the graveyard, because a horse like that will not step over a vampire’s grave. It stopped. They dug and found Sava Savanović lying in his coffin, red-faced and swollen, with one eye open, and they drove a hawthorn stake through him. As the stake went in, a butterfly came out of his mouth and flew off before anyone could catch it.

That is the detail the whole district remembered. The vampire’s soul lives in the butterfly, and if you do not burn the butterfly, you have not finished the job. That mill stood in one form or another into the twenty-first century. Greece, meanwhile, had islands with reputations, and Santorini was the one everyone talked about.

The soil there is volcanic and dry, and bodies in it do not rot the way they do elsewhere, and by the seventeenth century the island had so many vrykolakes that the other islands used it as a dumping ground. A Jesuit named François Richard, stationed there in the 1650s, wrote that when a village on another island had a corpse it could not deal with, it shipped the thing to Santorini. He describes the procedure. The body is dug up.

If it is found whole and swollen, the priest says the exorcism over it. If that fails, the heart is cut out and burned. If that fails, the whole body goes on the fire. He had seen it done.

He thought the Orthodox islanders were superstitious, and he also thought the corpses were real, because he had seen them undecayed after months, and he thought the devil was in them. Another scholar, Leo Allatius, a Greek who had gone over to Rome, wrote in 1645 that the vrykolakas of his childhood on Chios was a corpse that had not rotted, that came out at night and knocked on doors and called names. Greek folk belief more generally held that if you answered the first knock, you died. So people waited for the second.

Now some names with dates on them. The first man in the historical record to be called a vampire in so many words, at least according to the people of Kringa in Istria, who have put up a sign about it, was a peasant called Jure Grando. He died in 1656. He was buried in the churchyard, and then for sixteen years he walked.

The source is a book by a nobleman named Johann Weikhard von Valvasor, who published a huge survey of the Duchy of Carniola in 1689 and put the Grando story in among the geography and the mining reports. Valvasor says Grando came out of his grave at night and went through the village, and if he knocked on your door, somebody in that house died within days. He also says, in the heading of the section, that Grando raped his widow. Her name in later tellings is Ivana.

She said he came to her bed, that he was smiling, and that he gasped for breath as if he could not get enough air. In 1672, the village had had enough. The headman, a man named Miho Radetić, took nine villagers and the priest Giorgio to the churchyard at night with torches. They opened the grave.

Grando was lying in it, looking, they said, perfectly well. Rosy in the face, smiling. The priest held up a crucifix and said, more or less, look, here is Jesus Christ who saved us from hell, and you are a štrigon. Štrigon is the Istrian word.

One of the men tried to drive a hawthorn stake into the chest, and the stake would not go in. It bounced. He tried again, and it bounced again. The men lost their nerve and ran, and had to be talked back into the churchyard.

In the end, one of them, whose name in some versions is Stipan Milašić, climbed down into the grave with a saw and sawed the head off. As the blade went through the neck, the corpse screamed, and blood came up out of the grave until it filled it. That is how Valvasor tells it, and that is how they tell it in Kringa. Silesia, a generation earlier, had two cases that ended up in an English book.

Henry More, a Cambridge philosopher, put them in a treatise against atheism in 1653, on the grounds that if the dead could walk, then there must be spirits, and if there were spirits, then there must be God. The first was a shoemaker of Breslau, the city now called Wrocław. In September of 1591, he cut his own throat. His family, ashamed, told the neighbors he had died of a stroke, washed the body, dressed it, and had him buried in the churchyard with full honors before anyone could look too closely.

Within weeks he was walking. He came to people at night and lay on them, More says, and pressed on them so hard they thought they would suffocate, and in the morning they had the black marks of fingers on their throats. It went on for months. The whole town was sitting up at night with lamps lit.

Finally, in April of 1592, eight months after the burial, the council ordered the grave opened. The body was intact, uncorrupted, More says, but swollen up like a drum. The skin had come away from the hands and feet, and there was new skin underneath. The wound in the throat was still open and gaping.

They laid him out for the whole town to file past, left him out for six days, and he did not change. Then they buried him again under the gallows, and he kept coming. So they dug him up again and cut off his head and his arms and his legs and cut out his heart, which More says was as fresh as a newly killed calf’s, and burned the lot and threw the ashes in the river. The second was a man called Johannes Cuntius, an alderman of the town of Pentsch, kicked by a horse in 1592.

He said as he lay dying that his sins were too great to be forgiven and that he had made a pact with the devil. When he died, a black cat came in through the window and jumped on the bed and scratched at his face. After the burial, he came back and did the usual, but with more variety. He strangled old men.

He sucked at cows until they were dry. He got into the bed of his own widow and demanded what he had demanded when he was alive. He turned milk to blood and threw people out of bed and left the smell of the grave in every room he had been in. When they opened his grave, they found the body soft and bleeding, the face red, the eyes open, and when a man reached in to lift it, the body seized his hand.

They had to hack it into pieces. More says the pieces would not burn until the fire had been built to enormous size, and then they burned, and the town was quiet. Now a Greek island, where a French botanist stood in a church in the winter of 1700 and watched a village hunt one of these things, writing down every minute of it while thinking the whole business was madness. His name was Joseph Pitton de Tournefort.

He was a botanist of real standing, and the king had sent him around the eastern Mediterranean to collect plants. In the winter of 1700 he was on Mykonos, and a peasant there had been murdered in the fields. Nobody knew by whom. Tournefort describes the man as naturally quarrelsome and ill-natured, which may have been why nobody looked very hard for the killer.

They buried him. Two days later, people started to say he was walking. He came into houses at night, tumbled the furniture, put out the lamps, and gripped people from behind. Tournefort, not a credulous man, says at first the better sort of people laughed.

Then it went on, and the stories got worse, and the laughing stopped. On the tenth day after the burial, the priests said a mass, and then in the church they opened the coffin to take out the heart, because on Mykonos that was the method. Tournefort was in the church. He describes the butcher of the town, an old, clumsy man coming forward with his knife, and instead of opening the chest, he opened the belly.

He groped around in the entrails for a long time before somebody told him that the heart was higher up and he needed to cut through the diaphragm. He did eventually get it out. The corpse, Tournefort says, stank so badly that they had to burn frankincense in the church, and the smoke of the incense mixed with the smell of the body, and people started to feel the heat and the fumes and to shout. Someone said the smoke coming off the corpse was the devil leaving it.

Someone else said the body was warm. The butcher swore the blood was still red. And the whole church started screaming vrykolakas, so loud that he thought they would bring the roof down. Tournefort, standing near the front with his botanist’s nose, says he was almost poisoned by the stink.

The blood on the butcher’s hands was nothing more than a very stinking, nasty smear. They burned the heart on the shore, and the hauntings got worse. Now the vampire was beating people at night, breaking down doors, smashing windows, tearing people’s clothes, emptying the wine jars in the cellars. Whole families gave up on their houses and moved into the town square and slept there in the open, in January, because they thought he could not get at them with so many people around.

Tournefort says at nightfall you could hear nothing in the town but sighing and groaning. Processions went round for three days and three nights. The priests fasted. Holy water was poured into the dead man’s mouth.

People started sticking naked swords into the grave, and kept doing it until an Albanian passing through told them that the cross-shaped hilts of their swords were exactly what the devil liked, and they were only making him stronger. So they used Turkish swords instead. Families were packing to leave for Syros and Tinos. The magistrates of the island finally ordered the body dug up one more time and carried out to the point of St.

George, where they built a pyre with pitch and tar and burned the whole thing to nothing. The first of January 1701. The island calmed down. Tournefort went back to Paris, wrote it up, and called it an epidemic disease of the brain, as contagious and as dangerous as rabies in dogs.

He also noted, with the dryness of a man who has been standing in a church full of screaming people, that the vrykolakas of Mykonos had done everything a vampire could do except suck blood. It beat people and broke furniture and emptied the wine. Nobody on the island ever said it had been at their throat. Blood-drinking in this period belongs to the Slavic accounts, and it does not appear in his.

But the road the word took into the newspapers ran through Serbia. And the reason a district administrator was standing over a grave in Kiselova in 1725 comes down to a peace treaty and a border. In 1718, the Austrians beat the Ottomans and took a slab of northern Serbia in the peace treaty, including Belgrade. They held it for twenty-one years.

The land was a wreck, fought over for decades, villages burnt, people gone, and Vienna could not administer it in the ordinary way. It was run by the army, officers as governors, army surgeons as the only doctors, and a scattering of civilian officials in between. To hold the border against the Turks, the Austrians brought in armed settlers. Serbian families from across the line in Ottoman territory were offered land in exchange for military service.

These men were called hajduks, which had once meant bandit and now meant border militia. They came over with their families and their livestock and their beliefs. Among those beliefs was a very specific understanding of what happened when a bad death was buried in unwatched ground. When nine people died in Kiselova in a week, the men who dug up Peter Plogojovitz were the army’s own militia, and the army had to write it down.

The Kiselova report was printed in Vienna in July of 1725 and caused a stir, but it was the next one that went around the world, because the next one was signed by surgeons. The village is Medveđa, on the Morava River in the same military district. The story the villagers told the Austrians starts a few years before, with a hajduk named Arnold Paole. He had come over from the Ottoman side, from somewhere he called Gossowa, which people think is probably Kosovo, and he used to tell people that he had been troubled by a vampire there.

It had come at him, and he had gotten free of it, and the way he had cured himself was to go to the vampire’s grave and eat some of the earth from it and smear himself with its blood. That was a known cure. Around 1726, he fell off a haywagon and broke his neck and died. His name may not have been Arnold Paole in his own mouth.

That is what the German-speaking surgeons made of what they heard. Some people who have gone back over it think he may have been called Arnout Pavle, or something close, a Serb with an Albanian nickname who had come out of the mountains with the rest of the militia. Arnold Paole is the name that got printed, and so Arnold Paole is what he has been ever since. Twenty or thirty days after the burial, four people in Medveđa started complaining that Arnold Paole was coming to them at night.

All four died. The village, knowing what Paole had told them about his own history, did not wait long. Forty days after he was buried, they opened the grave. What the villagers described to the Austrian commission five years later was this.

The body was whole. Blood had run from the eyes, the nose, the mouth, the ears. The shirt, the shroud, and the coffin were soaked in blood. The old skin had come away from the hands and feet, and the nails with it, and there were new nails underneath and new skin.

They drove a stake through his heart, and they said, he gave a loud groan and bled heavily. They burned him. They dug up the four people he had killed and did the same to them, because anyone killed by a vampire became one. The village went quiet for about five years.

What they had not thought about, or had thought about and could not do anything about, was the cattle. Paole had been at the livestock too, they said, and some of the animals had been eaten. The belief was that vampire-tainted meat passed the condition on. In the autumn of 1731, the deaths started again.

This time they came faster. People died in two or three days, some of them in less. They complained of stabbing pains in the side, in the chest, of fever, of their limbs jerking. By early December, thirteen people were dead in six weeks.

The commander of the district sent for a doctor. The doctor who came was a contagion physician named Glaser from Paraćin. He arrived on the twelfth of December and did what a doctor does. He examined the sick.

He found no plague, no contagious disease that he recognized. He blamed the food. The villagers were Orthodox and in the middle of the winter fast before Christmas, and Glaser thought they were half-starved and sick from it. But he could not get anyone to listen, because the village had already made up its mind.

Families were sleeping three households to a house, with men sitting up awake all night. They told him that they would abandon the village and go over to the Turkish side unless the vampires were, in their word, executed. Glaser, who had come to talk about diet, walked out to the churchyard and had some graves opened and found, in grave after grave, bodies that had not rotted, swollen, with blood in the mouth. He wrote to Belgrade and asked for someone with more authority than a contagion doctor to come and deal with it.

Belgrade sent a regimental surgeon named Johann Flückinger, with two other military surgeons, Siegelt and Baumgarten, and two officers, a lieutenant colonel called Büttner and a lieutenant called von Lindenfels. Five men. They arrived in Medveđa in the first week of January 1732. On the seventh of January, in the presence of the village elders, and with the help of the local Romani, who did the digging, they opened the graves of seventeen people who had died in the past three months, and examined every one of them.

Flückinger wrote it up. All five signed it in Belgrade on the twenty-sixth of January. The title is Visum et repertum, seen and discovered. The report goes through the bodies one at a time.

The first was a woman named Stana, twenty years old. She had died in childbirth after three days of illness. Before she died, she had admitted to the village that when she was living on the Turkish side, she had smeared herself with the blood of a vampire to protect herself. Her baby had died with her, and because of a careless burial, the child’s body had been half-eaten by dogs.

Stana had been in the ground about two months. The surgeons opened her. She was, they say, quite complete and undecayed. When they cut into the chest, there was fresh, unclotted blood in the cavity around the heart.

The lungs, the liver, the spleen, the intestines were all, in the report’s phrase, as fresh as they would be in a healthy person. The womb was enlarged and inflamed because the afterbirth had never been delivered. The skin of her hands and her feet, with the old nails, had fallen away on its own, and underneath, they say, was clean new skin and new nails. The second was Milica, a woman of sixty or so, buried about ninety days.

She had died after three months of illness. The surgeons found her chest full of liquid blood and her organs sound. Here the report includes something the hajduks said. Men who had known Milica her whole life told the surgeons that in life she had been thin, a lean and dried-up sort of woman, and in the grave she had grown fat.

They marveled at it, and they had an explanation. Milica, they said, had eaten mutton from the sheep that Arnold Paole’s vampires had killed five years before. Third, a child of eight, buried ninety days, in the same state. Fourth, the sixteen-year-old son of a hajduk, buried nine weeks, dead after three days of illness, undecayed, full of blood.

Fifth, a seventeen-year-old named Joahim, three days sick, eight weeks buried, the same. Sixth was Rupa, a woman who had been ill for ten days and buried six weeks, and the report says her blood was fresh and her organs whole. With her was her child, eighteen days old, buried five weeks. The surgeons opened the infant and found the same.

Seventh, a ten-year-old girl, two months in the ground, undecayed, chest full of liquid blood. Then the wife of the village headman, and her child, and Rada, a servant buried five weeks after three months of sickness, and the wife of the local standard-bearer, with her child. These, the surgeons noted, were decayed, rotted the way a body should be. The report is careful to say so.

Five of the seventeen were, in its words, quite decomposed, and those five were put back. Then a hajduk called Stanje, sixty, dead after six days of illness and buried a month, full of blood. A twenty-five-year-old called Miloe, a hajduk’s son, six weeks buried, dead after three days, in the vampire condition. And then Stanica.

Stanica was twenty. She was the wife of a hajduk. She had been well, and one night she had woken up at midnight screaming in a terror the report calls terrible, and told her husband that Miloe, the young hajduk who had died and been buried some weeks before, had come and seized her by the throat and throttled her. She had a pain in her side after that.

She was ill for three days, and then she died. She had been in the ground eighteen days when they opened her. The report says her face was ruddy and lifelike, and that under her right ear was a blue bruise about the length of a finger. A single finger-shaped bruise on the throat, where she had said the dead man had held her.

Fresh blood filled her chest and the cavity around her heart. Her organs were whole, and the skin and nails of her hands and feet were coming away, with new ones under them. Twelve of the seventeen were declared in the report’s German, in vampirischen Zustand, the vampire condition. The surgeons, or the officers, or the villagers—the report does not make clear who decided—ordered the Romani to cut off the heads of all twelve.

The heads and the bodies were burned together, and the ashes were thrown into the Morava. The five who had decayed went back into the earth. Flückinger signed it, and Siegelt and Baumgarten and the two officers, and it went to Belgrade, and from Belgrade to Vienna. By the spring of 1732 it was in the newspapers of half of Europe.

Five trained surgeons of the Imperial Army, men who cut up bodies for a living, went into a village churchyard with instruments and opened chests and looked at spleens and wrote down what they saw in the language of an autopsy. And the language of an autopsy said that a twenty-year-old woman who had been dead for two months had liquid blood in her heart and fresh skin on her hands. It also said, in the same document, that five other bodies had rotted normally. The report does not explain the difference.

It does not try. It just records it, and then it records the beheading. Glaser, the contagion doctor, had a father who was also a physician in Vienna, and the son sent him a copy. The father, on the thirteenth of February 1732, wrote it up for a medical journal in Nuremberg.

A printer in Nuremberg ran off the whole report as a pamphlet. By March it was in Leipzig and Hamburg, and on the eleventh of March 1732, a London paper called the London Journal printed an English version. That page is generally credited as the moment the word vampire arrived in English. Within a couple of years, London writers were using it for anything that sucked the life out of people, tax collectors, stock-jobbers, politicians.

A pamphlet of the 1730s calls a prime minister a vampire, and means it as an insult, and readers understood the reference. In May of 1732, a paper called the Craftsman ran a long piece in which a country gentleman and a lawyer argue about the Serbian report over dinner. The lawyer points out that the whole thing is obviously a parable about the state. The dead man who sucks the blood of his neighbors is a public official.

The neighbors who sicken are the taxpayers. The stake through the heart is what a free people ought to do about it. The pattern the frontier surgeons had described, one body feeding on a whole village until the village either dies or digs, turned out to be a very handy frame for a political argument. For a decade or so, the word vampire in an English newspaper was more likely to mean a minister than a corpse.

Translators produced an English text of the Visum et repertum with all the names in it, Stana and Milica and Stanica, so that a merchant in Cheapside could sit over his coffee with the names of Serbian peasants in front of him. The word itself is Serbian, vampir, and behind that there is an old Slavic form, ąpyr, that shows up in a Russian manuscript from 1047 as the nickname of a priest in Novgorod. Nobody knows why a priest was called that, and nobody agrees on where the word came from before it was Slavic. The Oxford English Dictionary puts its first English citation a couple of years after the London Journal, in an account by three English travelers of 1734, who explained to their readers that the vampires of Hungary are supposed to be the bodies of deceased persons animated by evil spirits, which come out of the graves in the nighttime, suck the blood of many of the living, and thereby destroy them.

A very good one-sentence definition, written by men who had never been within a hundred miles of Medveđa. Back in the German universities, the report set off something close to a craze. Leipzig, Halle, Jena. In 1732 and 1733, the theology and medical faculties produced dissertation after dissertation on whether the dead could suck blood, whether the devil was involved, whether a body could be preserved by natural causes, and what the church’s position ought to be.

Michael Ranft brought out a new edition of his book with the Serbian cases folded in. The general drift of the academic argument was that the bodies were probably real and the blood-sucking probably was not, that something natural was going on in those graves, and that the peasants had built a monster on top of it. But nobody could say what the natural thing was. That took a Benedictine.

Dom Augustin Calmet was a French abbot and a serious Bible scholar. In 1746 he published a book with a title that runs to a full line, usually shortened to the Treatise on the Apparitions of Spirits and on Vampires. He had gathered a great deal. The Serbian reports, the Moravian ones, Tournefort’s island, the Hungarian cases.

He printed the Medveđa autopsies more or less complete, and he added a sentence that sums the whole affair up. Among forty bodies, he says, seventeen were found with all the most evident signs of vampirism. So they transfixed their hearts and cut off their heads also, then cast their ashes into the river. One story he collected has stayed with people.

A soldier was billeted with a peasant family on the Hungarian frontier, and one evening, as the family sat down to eat, a stranger came in and sat down with them. The family, the soldier said afterward, was plainly terrified, and nobody explained why. The next morning, the master of the house was dead. When the soldier asked what had happened, they told him the stranger had been the master’s father, ten years in the grave, and that he had come to sit at the table and take his son.

The regiment’s commander, Count Cabrera, heard about it and had the grave opened, and the body inside had the color and look of a living man. He had the head cut off and the body put back. Two more corpses were dug up in the same district on his orders that month. One, buried thirty years, the count said, had come back three times to feed on his own brother and son, and a nail was driven through his temple.

The other, dead sixteen years, had drained two of his own children, and he was burned. Calmet had this from an officer who had been at Cabrera’s table. Calmet did not know what to think. He was a churchman, he believed in the devil, and he had in front of him documents signed by army officers.

He went back and forth. He suggested it might be premature burial, people put in the ground alive, waking in the dark, dying slowly, which would explain the blood and the fresh look and the fact that the corpse groaned when it was staked. He suggested it might be fear working on frightened people. He ends more or less by saying that he cannot make the evidence and the impossibility agree, and he leaves both on the table.

The premature-burial idea was a serious one in 1746. Doctors of the period had very few ways of telling a deep coma from death. The stethoscope had not been invented, and the only test for a stopped heart most of them trusted was holding a mirror to the mouth and waiting. People were buried fast, especially in epidemics and in summer, in villages with one priest and no doctor.

The stories of coffins opened to find the body turned over, or the fingers worn to the bone, or the lid scratched from the inside, run all through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and a whole industry grew up in response. Coffins with bells. Coffins with a string tied to the corpse’s finger that would ring in the sexton’s cottage. A German doctor in the 1790s designed a waiting mortuary where the dead were laid out in warm rooms for days with a cord around every finger until they had visibly begun to rot, because rot was the only proof anyone trusted.

Calmet’s suggestion was that some of the Serbian vampires had gone into the ground breathing. If that was true, then when the villagers opened the grave weeks later, what they found was a body that had died in the dark, having struggled and bled at the mouth and nose from the effort, and perhaps torn its own shroud with its teeth. And when they put the stake in and the body groaned, they had simply killed the person a second time. Whether that happened at Medveđa, nobody can say.

Cases of it are documented elsewhere. He was laughed at. Voltaire got hold of the treatise and put an entry on vampires into the later editions of his Philosophical Dictionary. He says he cannot understand why, in an age of Locke and Newton, in the middle of the eighteenth century, people were talking about vampires in Poland and Hungary and Silesia and Moravia.

He points out that no vampire had ever been seen in London or Paris. Then he corrects himself. Paris and London were full of vampires, he says, but they were speculators and tax farmers and monks, and they did their blood-sucking in daylight, in good clothes, and grew fat on it. Rousseau, who did not agree with Voltaire about much, agreed with him about this.

He wrote to the Archbishop of Paris in 1763 that if there was one thing in the world that was well attested, it was vampires. Official reports, sworn statements from surgeons and priests and magistrates. Everything a historian could want. And yet, he says, who actually believes in them?

Somewhere in there, the joke had won. But out in the villages, nobody was laughing, and the exhumations went on. In Moravia, the Olmütz district had a run of cases in the 1720s that the bishop’s own consistory investigated, and a number of bodies were burned on episcopal permission. East Prussia has reports from 1710 and 1721 describing villages digging up plague dead.

Across Hungary and Transylvania and the Banat, the Austrian military administration filed report after report through the 1720s and 30s, most of them now lost, or sitting unread in Vienna. The surviving ones all run alike. An epidemic, a first death, a village that cannot sleep, an official who comes out to watch and writes that he could not stop them. And in 1755, the pattern came to the attention of an empress.

The place was Hermersdorf, on the border of Silesia and Moravia in what is now the Czech Republic. A woman named Rosina Polakin died there and was buried, and the village decided she had come back. They dug her up. The sources disagree about how long she had been in the ground, anywhere from a few weeks in a hard winter to a couple of years.

Her body, they said, was not yet rotten. The village had her dragged out of the churchyard on a rope and beheaded and burned, along with a number of other bodies from the same graveyard. This time, the local authorities, instead of just filing a report, complained to Vienna. Maria Theresa was on the throne.

Her personal physician was a Dutchman called Gerard van Swieten, a reformer by temperament, and he sent two physicians to Hermersdorf to look into what the empress’s own order called the so-called vampyrs or blood-suckers. They came back with a report, and van Swieten wrote his own on top of it, and his is savage. The body, he says, had been in a cold grave for a short time, and nobody with any training in anatomy would be surprised that it had not rotted. The rest, he says, was vain fear and superstitious credulity and plain ignorance among the people.

He wanted the whole business taken away from the village priests and put under the state, and the empress agreed. In the spring of 1755, with further orders the following year, it became illegal in the Habsburg lands to open a grave and mutilate a corpse on suspicion of vampirism without a government official present and government permission granted. In practice, that meant it stopped, or at least stopped being written down. The Hermersdorf case is the last big one in the Austrian records.

Van Swieten went on from vampires to witches. Over the next decade, he pushed the same argument against the witch trials that were still being held in the Hungarian and Croatian parts of the monarchy, and by 1766 Maria Theresa had a law that took those out of local hands too. The vampire went onto the list of things the Habsburg state had decided to police. The surgeons at Medveđa never answered the obvious question.

What was in those graves? A widely cited modern attempt at that is a book by an American folklorist named Paul Barber from 1988, Vampires, Burial, and Death. What Barber did was simple. He took the Visum et repertum and Frombald’s report and the rest of them, set them beside a forensic pathology textbook, and went through the signs one by one.

Start with the swelling. A body in the ground is full of bacteria, mostly from the gut, and when the immune system stops, they eat. The gas they make has nowhere to go. It fills the belly, then the chest, then the face and the limbs.

A thin person swells. A dried-up old woman, in the words of the hajduks who had known Milica, grows fat. The gas also pushes on everything inside, and what it pushes hardest on is the fluid that has been pooling in the lungs and the stomach as the tissues break down. That fluid is dark and thick, and it comes up the throat and out of the mouth and nose.

On a corpse, it looks very much like blood that has been drunk and has run back out. It soaks the shroud. It soaks the facecloth, and the facecloth, wet through and rotting, tears, so that when the grave is opened, the cloth over the mouth is in shreds, as at Alnwick, or bloodied, as at Drakelow, or apparently chewed, as in Venice. In the second and third week, in the right conditions, the outer layer of skin loosens from the layer underneath and comes away in sheets.

It comes off the hands first, sometimes in one piece like a glove, and the layer underneath is pink and clean. It looks new. The nails go with the old skin, and what is left where they were is the nail bed, smooth and pale. If you did not know better, you would say the corpse had grown new nails.

As the skin of the face and scalp dries and pulls back, the hair and the stubble stand out further than they did, and the gums recede, so the teeth look longer. Blood clots after death, and then in many bodies it liquefies again. The surgeons of 1732 did not know that. A surgeon who opened a chest and found liquid blood around the heart would have been within his rights to say the blood was fresh.

In the cold, and in a tight grave with little air, decomposition runs slow and uneven. One body rots, and the one beside it does not. And the one that does not has liquid blood in it. That is what Glaser found in the churchyard.

That is what Flückinger found. And the groan. If you push a stake through a chest that is tight with gas, the gas has to leave. It goes out through the throat, past the vocal cords, and it makes a sound, a long one.

The Serbians heard it from Arnold Paole, and the Istrians heard Jure Grando scream when the saw went through his neck. Barber also looked at the widow’s side of it. The thing that comes at night and lies on your chest and holds your throat while you cannot move is a description of sleep paralysis, which a large share of people experience at least once. And to a village that has just buried a man and lies awake listening for him, it happens with his face on it.

Stanica awoke at midnight and said Miloe had her by the throat. Three days later she was dead, of whatever was actually going round Medveđa that winter. The bruise under her ear could have been a dozen things. The surgeons wrote it down.

That is a list of what a body does. Whether it accounts for a village that lost seventeen people in three months is a different question. People have gone looking for a disease. A chemist named David Dolphin suggested in 1985 that it might have been porphyria, a group of blood disorders in which some sufferers cannot stand sunlight, and their gums recede, and in the bad forms their faces are disfigured, and he wondered whether they might have drunk blood to relieve the symptoms.

That got a lot of press and then a lot of pushback, on the grounds that drinking blood would do nothing for porphyria, and that patients with the disease were suddenly being asked by strangers whether they were vampires. It has mostly gone away. Rabies has stuck around a bit longer. In 1998, a Spanish neurologist named Juan Gómez-Alonso published a paper in the journal Neurology, arguing that the vampire of the 1720s looked a great deal like a man dying of rabies.

Aggression and biting. Insomnia. Wandering at night. A face pulled back into a grimace.

Bloody froth at the mouth. Spasms of the throat set off by light or by water or by strong smells, garlic among them. Or, and this is the one he liked, by mirrors, because there was an old folk test that a man was not truly rabid if he could bear to look at his own reflection. He pointed out that rabies makes some sufferers hypersexual, that most of them are men, and that there was a large outbreak of rabies among the dogs and wolves of Hungary between 1721 and 1728, exactly when and where the reports start.

A rabies expert at the American Centers for Disease Control was asked about it and said it was a bit of a stretch. Tuberculosis has been proposed for some outbreaks, and cholera and plague and anthrax for others, and pellagra, a vitamin deficiency that gives you a rash in sunlight and can end in dementia, for the Balkans in particular, where the peasants lived on maize. What all of those diseases have in common is how an outbreak moves through a house. One person dies.

The people who nursed that person, who slept in the same room and shared the same bowl, fall ill in turn. The deaths spread outward from the first grave through the family, then the neighbors. And if you are standing in that village with no idea what a bacterium is, it looks very much as though the first person to die has been coming back for the others. One grave, then a ring of graves around it.

The same thing happened across the Atlantic, in a part of the world where nobody had ever heard of Arnold Paole, and families there were doing this to their dead into the 1890s. The disease was consumption, tuberculosis, and in New England in the first half of the nineteenth century it was the leading cause of death, responsible for something like a quarter of all deaths. It worked slowly. A young person would start to cough, then to lose weight, then to bring up blood, then to sweat through the sheets at night, then to fade over months or years into a gray, wasted thing that could not get out of bed.

The family would nurse them and share the air of the room, and one by one the family would start to cough. A mother, then a daughter, then a son. It could empty a farmhouse over a decade. And the people watching it happen, Congregationalists and Baptists, farmers with a Bible on the shelf who had never in their lives seen a Serb, arrived at much the same idea.

The first to die was feeding on the rest. A folklorist named Michael Bell, who worked for the Rhode Island Historical Preservation Office, spent decades finding these cases in town records and newspapers and family letters. By the time he wrote his book, Food for the Dead, he had documented about eighty of them, from the 1780s into the 1890s, from Maine to Minnesota, and he thinks there are hundreds more. The families did not use the word vampire.

The newspapers did that later, with relish. What the families did was open the grave of the last person to die of consumption, look at the heart, and if it had blood in it, burn it. The earliest well-documented case is a minister’s. The Reverend Justus Forward of Belchertown, Massachusetts, had lost three daughters to consumption.

In July of 1788, another daughter was hemorrhaging, coughing up blood in the way that meant the end was close, and someone suggested that if the dead were feeding on the living, the way to stop it was to open the graves. On the twenty-first of July 1788, he opened the grave of his daughter Martha. He wrote about it afterward. The lungs, he says, were not dissolved.

They had blood in them, not fresh blood, but clotted. What he did next, he did not put in writing. The one people remember is Manchester, Vermont. Isaac Burton was a captain of militia and a deacon of the Congregational church.

In 1789 he married a young woman named Rachel Harris, healthy by every account. Within a year she was coughing, and in February of 1790 she died. Isaac married again, a girl named Hulda Powell, who happened to be Rachel’s stepsister, and Hulda started to cough. By 1793 she was wasting away, and the family and the neighbors had an explanation, and Isaac agreed to it.

In February of 1793, three years after Rachel was buried, they dug her up. An early history of the town describes it. They carried the coffin to the blacksmith’s shop. The blacksmith is named in some versions as Jacob Meacham, and the man who officiated, in the town history’s word, was Timothy Meacham.

They opened the body and took out the liver, the heart, and the lungs, what the town history calls the vitals, and put them on the forge and burned them to ashes. The history says that hundreds of people attended. Another local writer put the crowd at somewhere between five hundred and a thousand, in a town of three hundred. February, good sleighing.

The town history says everyone could get there. Timothy Meacham officiated at the altar in the sacrifice to the demon vampire who, it was believed, was still sucking the blood of the then living wife of Captain Burton. Hulda died on the sixth of September 1793. Rhode Island had the most of them, or at least the most that got written down, and some of them got written down by the town itself.

In Cumberland, in February of 1796, a farmer named Stephen Staples went to the town council and asked for formal permission to dig up his daughter Abigail, who had died of consumption, in order, the minutes say, to try an experiment on her body, so that he might save the life of his other daughter, Levina, who was sick with the same. The council granted it, and wrote it into the record in the same book as everything else the town decided that year, on condition that he put the body back afterward and made the grave decent. What the experiment was, the minutes do not say. Everyone in the room knew.

The Tillinghast case in Exeter has become the story people tell. Stutely Tillinghast, who went by Snuffy Stuke, was a farmer with a big family, fourteen children in some accounts, and an orchard. Sometime in the 1790s, he had a dream. Half his orchard died.

He walked out through the trees, and every second one was withered. He did not know what it meant until his daughter Sarah, who was nineteen or so, started to cough and died. After her, the others. A son, then a daughter, then another, and each of them, the story goes, said before they died that Sarah had come to them in the night.

She sat on the bed. She pressed on them. When the sixth child was ill, Stutely and some neighbors went to the family plot with shovels and opened all the graves. Most of the children were what you would expect after a year or two.

Sarah was not. Sarah, they said, looked as though she had been buried the week before, and when they cut open her chest, there was blood in the heart. They took the heart out and burned it there on the ground. The sick child died anyway, and the rest lived, and the family had the story for a hundred years.

In Vermont again, in 1817, a young man called Frederick Ransom died at twenty, a Dartmouth student from South Woodstock, and consumption took him on Valentine’s Day. His father had the body dug up and the heart cut out and burned in a blacksmith’s forge in front of a good part of the town. Frederick’s younger brother, Daniel, wrote about it seventy years later as an old man, and said that it had been done to save the rest of the family, and that it had not worked. Their mother died, then a sister, then two more brothers.

Daniel outlived them all. Ohio, the same year. A family named Saladay in Scioto County burned the entrails of a dead relative in front of what one account calls a large concourse of spectators, and the account adds flatly that the other members of the family continued to die off until the last one was gone except George. Rhode Island, 1827.

Nancy Young was nineteen when she died, and her sister Almira was already coughing. The family dug Nancy up, and in this case burned the whole body on a pyre, and had the sick members of the household stand in the smoke and breathe it in. Almira died anyway. Plymouth, Massachusetts, has one.

Connecticut has several more. Bell found cases in Maine. And this went on into the age of newspapers and railways and photography. In Griswold, Connecticut, in 1845, a young man named Lemuel Ray died of consumption at twenty-four.

His father followed him in 1849, and then another son, Elisha. In 1854, a third brother, Henry, got sick, and the family went out to the cemetery and dug up Lemuel and Elisha, nine years and three years dead, and burned what they found in the coffins, right there in the graveyard, in front of the town. The local paper reported it in a tone of faint disbelief. The reporters who wrote these things up in the 1850s and 1890s were city men writing about country people, and the tone never varies.

A sort of amused horror that such things could still happen in Connecticut in the age of the telegraph. The families, as a rule, did not talk to the papers. They did what they did in the graveyard and went home and did not discuss it. When Bell went looking for descendants a century later, he found people who knew the stories and preferred not to tell them.

A public act performed in private grief and written down by strangers. Griswold gave up one more, much later, in 1990. Some children were playing in a gravel pit near the town, and a bank collapsed, and two skulls rolled out. The state archaeologist, Nicholas Bellantoni, was called in, and it turned out there was a forgotten family burial ground in the hillside.

Twenty-nine graves, farm people from around 1800. One of the coffins had a pattern of brass tacks hammered into the lid, JB, and the number 55. Initials and an age. When they opened it, the man inside had been taken apart.

The skull had been removed from the spine and set on top of the chest, and the two thigh bones had been pulled out and crossed under it. A skull and crossbones laid out in the coffin. The ribs on one side had been broken through at some point about five years after the burial, in what looks very much like somebody going in after the heart and finding only bone, and rearranging what was left into a shape that meant something. When the ribs were examined, they had the lesions of a chronic lung infection.

Tuberculosis, probably. In 2019, a DNA study matched him tentatively to a farmer named John Barber, and the small grave beside him, marked NB13, to his son Nathan, who died in 1826. The boy died first. The father followed.

Five years after that, someone in the family or the town went into the father’s grave. Thoreau knew about all this. In his journal on the twenty-sixth of September 1859, he wrote one paragraph. The savage in man, he says, is never quite eradicated.

He had just come across an account of a family in Vermont who, several of its members having died of consumption, burned the lungs and heart and liver of the last deceased in order to prevent any more from having it. The last of them, and the one that may have crossed the Atlantic back the other way, is Mercy Brown, Exeter, Rhode Island. The same town as the Tillinghasts, a century on. George Brown was a farmer.

In December of 1883, his wife Mary Eliza died of consumption. Seven months later, his eldest daughter, Mary Olive, died of it too, at twenty. His son Edwin, in his early twenties, started to cough a few years after that, and the doctors sent him to Colorado Springs, where the air was supposed to be good for the lungs. It did not do much.

While Edwin was away, his younger sister, Mercy, whom the family called Lena, got sick, and got sick fast. Galloping consumption, they called it. She died in January of 1892, at nineteen. The ground was frozen, and she could not be buried, so her coffin was put in the stone crypt at Chestnut Hill Cemetery to wait for spring.

Edwin came home to die, and the neighbors started talking. Somebody, one of the dead, was feeding on him. The old people in Exeter knew the remedy. George Brown, by most accounts, did not believe it, but he had buried his wife and two daughters, and he was watching his son go, and when the neighbors asked his permission, he gave it.

On the seventeenth of March 1892, a group of men went to Chestnut Hill with a doctor from the town, Harold Metcalf, and a correspondent from the Providence Journal. They opened Mary Eliza’s grave first. Eight years. Bones.

They opened Mary Olive’s. Seven years. Bones. Then they opened the crypt and took the lid off Mercy’s coffin.

She had been dead two months. It had been a Rhode Island winter, and she had been in a stone box above the ground the whole time. The men said she had moved. She was lying on her side, they said, though she had been laid on her back.

Her face looked to them as it had looked. Dr. Metcalf examined her and said this was about what you would expect from a body kept cold for nine weeks, and that her lungs, when he opened her, showed tuberculosis. Then he cut out her heart and her liver, and there was blood in the heart.

Decomposed, he said. The men said it was fresh. They took the heart and the liver out to a rock near the cemetery, built a fire on the rock, and burned them. Then they gathered the ashes and stirred them into water and brought the cup to Edwin, and Edwin drank it.

He died on the second of May, 1892, seven weeks later. George Brown lived on for thirty years. He kept the farm. The stone on Mercy’s grave at Chestnut Hill is still there, a plain one with her name and her age, and it has been chipped at so often by people wanting a piece of it that the cemetery association eventually ran an iron strap around it and bolted the strap into the ground.

People leave things on it. Coins, notes. Exeter still gets visitors in October who want to see the rock where the heart was burned. The rock is there.

The Providence Journal ran the story two days after the exhumation, and a few days later the same paper ran an editorial condemning what had been done as superstition. The story went out on the wires, and a clipping of it, or of one of the follow-ups, is said to have been found in the papers of a theater manager in London after he died in 1912, a man who had been collecting material on the subject for a novel he had already written. His name was Bram Stoker. Before the novel, though, there are two real people whose names ended up attached to it, and neither of them ever got out of a grave.

The first is a prince of Wallachia, and the name comes from his father. Vlad II was admitted in 1431 to a chivalric order founded by the Holy Roman Emperor, called the Order of the Dragon, and he took the dragon as his badge, and the Wallachians started calling him Dracul, the dragon. It also happens that dracul in Romanian means devil, and the two meanings sat side by side from the start. His son, born around the same year, was Dracula, son of the dragon, son of the devil.

The Romanians later called the son something else, Țepeș, the Impaler. He was a hostage as a boy, held by the Ottomans as a guarantee of his father’s good behavior. While he was in Turkish hands, his father was killed by the Wallachian nobles, the boyars, and his older brother Mircea was, by the accounts that survive, tortured with hot irons and buried alive. Vlad got out.

He came back to Wallachia in 1448 for a couple of months, was thrown out, came back again in 1456, and this time he stayed for six years. What he did in those six years is in three sets of sources. German accounts written from the 1460s and printed with woodcuts from the 1480s, by Saxon merchants who hated him. A Russian account written by a diplomat who had been in Hungary.

And a long poem by a German court singer called Michael Beheim, who talked to a monk who had been in Wallachia, and who put the whole thing into verse in 1463 under a title that translates as the Story of a Bloodthirsty Madman Called Dracula of Wallachia. They disagree on details and on numbers. They agree on the method. Impaling is a slow way to kill a person.

The stake was sharpened but often deliberately blunted at the tip and greased, so that it would not pierce the organs and kill quickly. The point went into the body, most often through the anus, sometimes through the genitals, sometimes through the chest or the side. Then the stake was raised and set upright in the ground, and the weight of the body did the rest. Gravity pulled the person down onto the wood, inch by inch, over hours, and in some cases the accounts talk of days, until the point came out through the shoulder or the neck or the mouth.

People remained conscious for a long part of it. The stakes were set in rows, in fields, along roads, outside city gates, so that anyone approaching Târgoviște, the capital, came through a forest of them. The stories the pamphlets tell go like this. At Easter in 1457 or 1459—the sources disagree—he invited the boyars and their families to a feast in Târgoviște.

A few hundred people, by the pamphlets’ count. When they had eaten, he asked them how many princes of Wallachia each of them had served in their lifetime. Every one of them, even the youngest, had seen at least seven come and go, which was his point. These were the men who made and unmade princes, and had made and unmade his father.

The old ones were taken out and impaled in the courtyard. The younger ones and their wives and children were marched into the mountains and set to building a fortress at Poenari, hauling stone up a cliff, and the accounts say they worked until their fine clothes fell off their backs in rags, and that many of them died on the site. The Saxon merchants of Transylvania had been backing rival claimants to his throne and cutting his traders out of their markets, and in 1459 and 1460 he crossed the mountains and burned their villages and took their people. At Brașov, on St.

Bartholomew’s Day, the pamphlets say he had the captives impaled on a hill outside the town. This is where Beheim’s poem puts the scene that gave the name its later meaning. Vlad had a table set among the stakes and ate his dinner there among the dying, and dipped his bread in their blood. No earlier source connects the name Dracula to the drinking of blood.

It comes from a hostile poem written by a man who was not there, and it stuck. At Amlaș the following year, the pamphlets say he burned the town and impaled or hacked to pieces everyone in it. The German texts give figures in the tens of thousands for the whole Transylvanian campaign, which most historians take as a way of saying a great many. The smaller stories are the ones people repeat.

Envoys came from the sultan and would not take off their turbans in his presence, because that was their custom, and he had the turbans nailed to their heads so that they could keep the custom forever. He invited the beggars and the sick and the vagrants of the country to a great feast in a hall in Târgoviște, fed them and let them drink, asked them whether they would like to be free of all want, and when they said yes, he had the doors barred and the hall set on fire. A foreign merchant was robbed of 160 ducats in his territory, and Vlad had the thief caught and impaled, and had the merchant’s money returned, plus one ducat. When the merchant, counting it, reported the extra coin, Vlad told him that if he had kept quiet, he would have gone on the stake beside the thief.

The Russian account, more admiring than the German ones, likes that story. It is a story about a country where nobody stole. The German pamphlets like the one about the woman whose husband complained that his shirt was too short, and Vlad had her hands cut off and impaled her for laziness. In 1461 and 62, he stopped paying tribute to the Sultan and went across the Danube in winter and burned every Ottoman town and fort from the Black Sea to the Iron Gates.

He wrote to the king of Hungary with the count. 23,884 Turks and Bulgarians killed, he said, and that was only the ones whose heads had been brought in to be tallied. It did not include the people burned in their houses. So Mehmed II came for him.

The Sultan who had taken Constantinople nine years earlier, with an army the chroniclers put at 90,000, crossed the Danube in June of 1462. Vlad could not meet that in the field, though he emptied the country ahead of it, poisoned the wells, burned the crops, and on the night of the sixteenth of June, he rode into the Ottoman camp with a few thousand horsemen in the dark, trying to reach the Sultan’s tent and kill him. He got the wrong tent. He killed a great many men and was driven off by morning.

A few days later, the Ottoman army came up the road to Târgoviște, and outside the city they found what Vlad had left for them. The Greek chronicler Chalkokondyles describes it. A field of stakes, he says, about three kilometers long and one wide. On the stakes, the bodies of about twenty thousand men, women, and children.

Ottoman prisoners taken over the past year, and Bulgarians, and anyone else he had. Some of them had been there long enough for birds to build nests in their rib cages. Some had been impaled with their infants. The Sultan’s own commander, Hamza Pasha, who had been sent to capture Vlad by treachery the year before and had been captured instead, was on the tallest stake in the middle, still in his robes of office.

Chalkokondyles says the Sultan stopped and looked at it for a long time and said that a man who could do this was worth something, and turned his army around. So the chronicler tells it. An Ottoman writer who was there, Enveri, also describes the field. Historians argue about the number a good deal more than they argue about the field.

Vlad was thrown out anyway by the end of the year, his own boyars going over to his brother Radu, and the king of Hungary, whom he had gone to for help, locked him up instead and kept him for twelve years. First in a fortress, later in a house in Buda, where he was allowed to marry a cousin of the king’s, and where, according to the Russian account, he kept himself amused by catching birds and mice and impaling them on little sticks. It was during those years that the pamphlets were printed, a great deal. The German ones went through edition after edition into the 1500s, and the printers put woodcuts on the front.

The woodcut most often reproduced, from a Strasbourg edition of 1499, shows a man in a fur hat sitting at a table laid with a cloth and dishes in the middle of a field of impaled bodies, while a servant beside him hacks up a corpse with an axe. That woodcut is the picture of Dracula that circulated in Europe for centuries. A man having his dinner in a forest of the dead. Whether he ever did that is the poem’s word against nothing.

The picture did not need to be true to be the picture. He came back for a third reign in 1476 and lasted a couple of months. He died fighting, or was assassinated, near Bucharest at the end of that year or the beginning of the next, and most of the accounts say his head was cut off and packed in honey and sent to Constantinople, where the Sultan had it put on a spike. The body has never been found.

A monastery on an island in a lake near Bucharest, Snagov, has claimed the grave for centuries, and when the tomb in front of the altar was opened in 1933, there were horse bones in it. Estimates of how many people he killed over his whole life, built mostly on hostile sources, run around eighty thousand. He drank no blood in any source but the poem, and he never got out of any grave. For four hundred years he was a name in Romanian and Hungarian and German history, with no vampire attached to it.

The man who put him in the novel found the name in a library in Whitby in the summer of 1890, in a book about Wallachia and Moldavia by a former British consul named Wilkinson, with a footnote that said Dracula in the Wallachian language means devil. Stoker’s working notes survive in a museum in Philadelphia, and the villain in the early notes is called Count Wampyr. Wampyr is crossed out. Dracula is written in.

The second name is a woman’s. Erzsébet Báthory, Elizabeth in English, was born in 1560 into one of the great families of Hungary. An uncle was king of Poland. Cousins ruled Transylvania.

She was married at fourteen to Ferenc Nádasdy, a soldier who spent most of his life fighting the Turks and who was famous even among his own men for what he did to prisoners. The wedding gift was a castle called Csejte, now Čachtice, in what is now Slovakia. She ran the estates while he was at war. They had children, and in 1604 he died, and she was a widow with an enormous fortune and a great deal of property and no husband, and the complaints started to reach the court.

For years there had been talk. Servant girls from the villages around Csejte went into the castle to work and did not come out. Bodies had been buried, people said, in the castle grounds, in the churchyard at night, in the fields. A Lutheran minister had refused to bury some of the dead because of what he saw on them.

In 1610, the king of Hungary, Mátyás, ordered his palatine, a man named György Thurzó, who happened to be related to the countess by marriage, to investigate. Thurzó’s notaries went round the district and took depositions from close to three hundred witnesses—servants, priests, villagers, minor nobles, people who had worked in the castle or had daughters who had. On the twenty-ninth of December 1610, or the thirtieth, the sources differ by a day, Thurzó arrived at Csejte with soldiers and went in. He wrote to his wife about what he found.

One girl dead, he said. Others dying. Others wounded and locked up. The dead girl in some of the depositions is named as Dorka.

The story the servants told about her is that she had been caught stealing a pear, and the countess had had her beaten through the afternoon of the day after Christmas until she could no longer stand, and then had gone on, and that she had died on the floor sometime in the night, and had still been lying there when the palatine’s men came through the door. The testimony is where the horror lives. The witnesses were servants, and they described the work. Girls were beaten with clubs, with whips, with the flat of a sword, in the countess’s own rooms.

One witness said that when the beating was done, there was so much blood on the floor that it had to be scattered with ashes and cinders before anyone could walk on it, and that the countess had to change her dress. Girls were burned with hot irons and with coins heated in a fire and pressed into the skin. Girls had needles pushed under their fingernails and were told that if it hurt, they could pull them out. And when they pulled them out, their fingers were cut off.

Some witnesses spoke of lips sewn shut. Girls were stripped and taken out into the snow, and water was poured over them until they froze standing. In the summer, they were stripped and smeared with honey and tied outside for the insects. They were starved, sometimes for a week.

And there were bites. Several witnesses said that Erzsébet Báthory bit pieces of flesh out of girls’ faces, out of their shoulders, out of their breasts. And a man’s servant said that when she was too ill to get out of bed, she had a girl brought to the bedside so that she could bite her from where she lay. Four servants were arrested with her.

Two older women, Ilona Jó and Dorottya Szentes, who had been the girls’ minders and had held them down. A younger woman, Katalin Beneczky. And a young man, a dwarf according to some accounts, named János Ujváry, who everyone called Fickó. They were questioned at Bytča on the second of January 1611 and again on the seventh, and each of them gave a number.

Fickó said 37 girls. Ilona Jó said 50 or more. Dorottya said 36. Beneczky said 50.

And one of the witnesses, a woman called Zsuzsanna, said that a court official named Jakab Szilvási had seen a book in the countess’s own handwriting with a list of the girls, and that there were 650 names in it. At the start, the girls had been peasants, daughters of the villages around the castle, taken in as servants. Toward the end, the testimony says, when the peasant families had stopped sending their daughters, she had begun taking in the daughters of the lesser nobility. Girls sent to her to learn manners.

Those were the ones whose families could write to the king. That is probably the main reason the investigation happened when it did. The trial of the servants was over in a week. Ilona Jó and Dorottya Szentes were sentenced to have their fingers torn out one at a time with red-hot pincers, as the instruments of their crimes, and then to be burned alive.

Fickó, being younger and judged less responsible, was beheaded, and his body thrown on the same fire. Beneczky was spared, because several witnesses said she had tried to feed the girls in secret. A fifth accomplice, a woman called Majerová, was caught later and executed. Erzsébet Báthory was never tried.

She was too wellborn and too well-connected, and the crown owed her family a great deal of money that it did not want to repay to her heirs, and a trial would have meant a confiscation and a scandal that touched some of the greatest families in Hungary. So instead, the palatine had her confined. By the usual account, masons came to Csejte and sealed her into a set of rooms in the castle, bricked up the windows and the doors, and left slits for air and a hatch for food. She lived in there for three and a half years.

A guard heard her, in August of 1614, complaining that her hands were cold. The next morning, the twenty-first, she was found dead. She was buried in the church at Čachtice, and by tradition the villagers objected so loudly to having her there that the body was moved to the family crypt at Ecsed in the east. Where it is now, nobody can say.

Nothing in any of the three hundred depositions says that she bathed in blood. That story arrives 115 years later, in a book by a Jesuit named László Turóczi printed in 1729, and it spreads from there. By the time the actual testimony was printed in 1817, the bloodbath had become the thing everybody knew about her. Some historians think the whole case was a political job, that Thurzó and the king wanted her lands and her debts canceled and built a case out of servants’ talk under threat of torture.

Others point to three hundred witnesses, many of them people with no reason to lie, describing the same rooms and the same methods, and ask how much of that you can put down to pressure. Both readings are on the table. What is not in dispute is that she ended her life shut in a room in her own castle, and that no record survives of what was found in the grounds afterward. A third name gets pulled into this sometimes.

Gilles de Rais was a marshal of France, a companion of Joan of Arc, one of the richest men in the kingdom. In October of 1440, he was tried at Nantes, on the evidence of parents from villages all over his lands whose sons had gone up to the castle to serve and had never come home, and on his own confession, which he gave after being shown the instruments of torture and which describes the rape and murder of boys in numbers that run into the dozens or more. He was hanged and burned on the twenty-sixth of October 1440. Nobody at the time called him a vampire.

The word did not exist yet. But the story—the lord in the castle who takes the children of the villages—is the story of Csejte, and later writers looking for the origins of the aristocratic monster kept finding him. In the twentieth century, the newspapers gave the name to men who had done the thing on purpose. Fritz Haarmann was a police informant and a small-time trader in Hanover after the First World War, when the city was full of homeless boys who had drifted in looking for work.

Between 1918 and 1924, he picked them up at the railway station, took them to his room, and killed them. At his trial, he said that he killed by biting. He would get on top of a boy and bite through the throat, through the windpipe, and hold on until the boy stopped moving. Twenty-four murders were proven.

The bones went into the river Leine, and in 1924 children playing on the bank found a skull, and then more skulls, and the police dragged the river and brought up more than five hundred human bones. He was beheaded with a guillotine in April of 1925, and the papers had called him the vampire of Hanover for months by then. Peter Kürten in Düsseldorf in 1929 killed at least nine people, most of them women and girls, with a hammer, with scissors, with a knife, and he told the psychiatrist who examined him that what he wanted was the blood. He drank it from the wounds, from the throat of a young woman he had strangled, from the temple of a man he had struck with a hammer, from a swan he had killed in a park when there was nobody else available.

He was guillotined in July of 1931, and the psychiatrist reported that his last question, as he was taken to the blade, was whether he would be able to hear, even for a second, the sound of his own blood gushing from the stump of his neck. He said that would be the pleasure to end all pleasures. And in Sacramento, California, at the end of 1977 and the beginning of 1978, a young man called Richard Chase, who had been in and out of psychiatric hospitals and had a fixed belief that his blood was turning to powder and had to be replaced, killed six people in a month, including a mother, a young child, and an infant, and drank their blood, and in the worst of the cases took the organs. He died in prison in 1980.

The press had already named him. Enough of the real blood. Now the books. The books are where the vampire stopped being a farmer.

The first poem with a vampire in it in a western language is usually said to be German. Heinrich August Ossenfelder, 1748, a short piece called The Vampire, in which a young man threatens a pious girl that if she will not have him, he will come to her in the night and drink her blood, and that she will find his kiss a better thing than her mother’s Christianity. It is a seduction. The Serbian corpse turned into a lover’s threat, written twelve years after the Medveđa report.

Bürger’s Lenore in 1773 has a dead soldier ride through the night to collect his bride and carry her to the grave, and a line from it, the dead travel fast, turns up in Stoker’s Dracula 120 years on. Goethe’s Bride of Corinth we have already met. Coleridge’s Christabel, written in the 1790s, has a woman called Geraldine who gets into a young girl’s bed and, by morning, has drained something out of her. Byron in The Giaour, in 1813, puts a curse on his hero.

On earth as vampire sent, thy course shall from its tomb be rent, then ghastly haunt thy native place, and suck the blood of all thy race. And he puts a footnote on it, citing Tournefort. Then there is the wet summer at Lake Geneva, June of 1816, the year without a summer, when a volcano in the East Indies had put so much ash in the sky that it rained across Europe for months. Byron had rented a villa called Diodati on the lake, and staying with him were his personal physician, a young man called John Polidori, and across the way Percy Shelley, Mary Godwin, who was eighteen, and Claire Clairmont, who was pregnant by Byron.

Stuck indoors, they told ghost stories, and Byron proposed that each of them write one. Mary Godwin’s became Frankenstein. Byron wrote a fragment about an English aristocrat who dies in Greece and swears his companion to secrecy, and abandoned it. Polidori, clever and badly treated by his employer, took Byron’s fragment and finished it and made the aristocrat a vampire.

The Vampyre came out in a magazine in April of 1819 under Byron’s name, which was a mistake or a marketing decision, and it was a sensation across Europe. The vampire in it is called Lord Ruthven. He is pale and cold, and he moves through London society seducing and ruining, and he goes to Greece and is shot and dies and comes back, and he marries the narrator’s sister, and on the wedding night, she is found drained. The name Ruthven had been used by Byron’s ex-lover, Lady Caroline Lamb, for a character based on Byron in a novel she wrote to humiliate him.

So Polidori’s vampire is Byron, and everybody at the time knew it. And the Serbian farmer with the new fingernails had become a lord with a good tailor. In one short story, in one bad summer. Varney the Vampire followed, a penny serial that ran for two years in the 1840s and eventually came to well over eight hundred double-column pages, and Varney gave the creature its fangs and its two puncture wounds on the throat.

Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla in 1872 gave it a female form and a slow, intimate feeding on a young girl in an Austrian castle, and an ending that could have been written by Flückinger. The commission goes to the tomb of the Karnsteins and opens it. The body inside lies in seven inches of blood. The eyes are open.

The flesh is warm. A stake is driven through the heart, and the thing shrieks, and the head is struck off, and body and head are burned, and the ashes thrown in the river. Le Fanu knew his Calmet. Then Stoker in 1897, after seven years of notes.

He was the business manager of the actor Henry Irving’s theater, the Lyceum, and Irving was a domineering, exhausting man, and a lot of people see Irving in the count. Stoker took the name from Wilkinson’s book. He took the folklore from an essay by a woman called Emily Gerard, who had lived in Transylvania and written up its superstitions for a magazine in 1885, including the word nosferatu and the garlic. He took the shipwreck from Whitby, where in 1885 a Russian schooner called the Dmitri had run aground in a storm below the abbey, and he made it the Demeter, and put a dead captain at the wheel.

And the count he built out of all that is, if you look at him, half peasant vampire and half Ruthven. He has hair in the palms of his hands. His breath stinks. When Harker finds him in his box of earth, in the crypt after a feed, he is bloated, and blood is running from the corners of his mouth down over his chin, and his skin is flushed and swollen, like a leech.

Stoker had gone through the Serbian reports too, or Calmet, or Le Fanu, who had. That is Arnold Paole in the box. He just has a title now. And when Stoker needs to kill one, he goes to the churchyard.

Lucy Westenra, the first victim in the book, dies of the count’s attentions and is buried in a vault in Hampstead. Within days, children on the heath are being found at dawn with small wounds in their throats, talking about a lady who took them for a walk. Van Helsing takes her fiancé and two other men into the vault at night. When they open the coffin, she is fuller in the face than she was in life.

Her lips red, her teeth longer, and there is blood on her mouth and on her shroud. Her fiancé is the one who has to do it. He puts the point of the stake over her heart and strikes it with a hammer. The thing in the coffin screams and writhes and bites at the air, and the blood comes up out of the chest and out of the mouth in a spray, and he keeps striking until it stops.

Then they cut off her head and fill the mouth with garlic. That scene is Medveđa moved to a suburb of London and given a hammer, written 165 years after the surgeons signed their report. The villages never stopped. In 1970 in London, a young man named David Farrant wrote to the local paper in Hampstead to say that he had seen a tall gray figure moving among the tombs of Highgate Cemetery, which was overgrown and derelict at the time and full of broken vaults.

Other letters came in. People had seen the figure too. People had found foxes lying dead on the paths with no visible wounds, drained, one man said, of blood. Another young man, Sean Manchester, wrote in to say that what Farrant had seen was a king vampire from Wallachia, brought to England in a coffin in the eighteenth century and buried at Highgate, woken by the black-magic rituals that had been going on in the cemetery, and that it needed dealing with.

On the thirteenth of March 1970, a television crew interviewed both of them at the cemetery gates, and that evening a crowd climbed over the walls with stakes and crosses and torches and went hunting through the graves. Over the following months, vaults were broken into, coffins were opened, and one corpse was found on the path with its head missing. Farrant himself was arrested in the cemetery that August, at night, carrying a crucifix and a sharpened wooden stake, and told the court he had been waiting for the thing to appear. That charge was thrown out.

Others were not, and he went to prison in 1974 on charges that included damaging memorials and interfering with the dead. Manchester published a book saying that he had found the vampire and staked it. The two of them feuded for the rest of their lives. In 2012, in western Serbia, the council of a village called Zarožje put out a public warning to its residents.

An old water mill on the river had collapsed. The mill was known locally, and in the nineteenth-century story about it, as the home of a vampire named Sava Savanović, who had killed the millers who tried to grind flour there. While the mill had stood, he had been contained. Now it was gone, and he was loose.

The council advised people to hang garlic in their windows and to keep a cross in the house. The mayor gave interviews. The story went round the world as a joke. And the people of Zarožje, by their own account, were not entirely joking.

In Malawi, in the autumn of 2017, rumors went through the southern districts that blood-suckers had crossed the border from Mozambique and were taking blood from people in their beds at night. The word there was animopa. The stories said they came with syringes, or with a chemical that put a household to sleep, and that they took the blood to sell. Crowds formed.

Strangers were stopped on roads. In the districts of Mulanje and Phalombe, at least nine people were beaten to death by mobs who believed they were vampires. Some of them visitors, some of them locals accused by neighbors. The United Nations pulled its staff out of the area for a while.

The government imposed curfews. The president toured the districts and condemned the killings. And they stopped. And nobody was ever quite sure how they had started.

And in Romania, in the winter of 2004, a man named Petre Toma died. He was 76, in a village called Marotinu de Sus, in the county of Dolj, in the south of the country. Nothing unusual about his death. He was buried in December in the village churchyard.

In January, his niece began to say that he was coming to her at night. She was ill. She said she could feel him on her, that he was drinking her. A neighbor said she heard the niece cry out one night.

He’s on top of me. Her brother-in-law was a man named Gheorghe Marinescu. He knew what to do. Everyone in that village knew, he said, and had known for generations, and had done it for as long as anyone could remember.

He and five other men, relatives, went to the churchyard at night with a lantern and a pitchfork. They opened the grave. They opened the coffin. Petre Toma, they said, was lying on his side with his mouth open and blood on his lips, and his face looked well.

They tore open his chest with the pitchfork and cut out his heart, and they said it was full of blood. They took the heart to a crossroads at the edge of the village and burned it on a fire, and gathered the ashes into a cup and mixed them with water, and took the cup back to the niece and the other sick relatives, and they drank it. The niece got better. That is what she said.

That is what all of them said. Petre Toma’s daughter, who lived in the city, found out what had been done to her father and went to the police. The six men were charged with disturbing the peace of the dead. In 2005, they were each sentenced to six months.

The prosecutor told a reporter that the practice had gone on in the villages of Dolj for as long as there had been villages, and that this was the first time anyone had been prosecuted for it. Gheorghe Marinescu told the same reporter that he did not understand what the fuss was about. He said they had only done what people had always done.

He said his niece was alive, and that he would do it again.