Killing the Dead: Vampire Epidemics From Mesopotamia to the New World
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When fear refuses to stay buried, even the dead aren’t safe.
Killing the Dead is the first global investigation into one of humanity’s strangest outbreaks of mass hysteria: the vampire epidemic. From ancient Mesopotamia to modern-day Haiti, historian John Blair unearths the dark fascination with corpses that refuse to rest — and the rituals designed to destroy them.
In 1732, Britain’s morning papers told of a chilling event: Serbian villagers exhumed bodies swollen with blood and burned them, convinced they had risen as vampires. But this was no isolated madness. From ancient Assyria and China to medieval Europe and the Americas, “corpse-killing” flared wherever societies were pushed to their breaking point.
Blending archaeology, anthropology, and folklore, Blair reveals how the vampire myth reflects humanity’s deepest collective anxieties — and how destroying the dead became a twisted form of healing.
Richly illustrated and provocative, Killing the Dead exposes the disturbing truth: the vampire was never just a monster of the night, but a mirror of our own fears, rituals, and need to make sense of death itself.