Vampires, Burial, and Death by Paul Barber

To confirm a case of vampirism, villagers exhumed the suspected revenant’s grave. If a village was struck by a disease epidemic, many Europeans believed that the first person to die had become a vampire and was attacking their village causing additional deaths. These revenant traditions likely evolved out of a misunderstanding of disease transmission and post-mortem decomposition. Both the upir and strigoi returned to drink the blood of relatives and fellow villagers, which eventually caused illness or death. While the Romanians believed that a strigoi was made when a troubled or mischievous person dies. The fictional vampire was popularized by Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) but was influenced by the folkloric revenants of Central and Eastern European cultures.įor the Slavic people an upir, or ubir, was an unclean spirit that possessed a decomposing corpse. Fictional vampires are supernatural creatures seen in movies and television with = pale skin and long sharp teeth. In New England in the 19 th century so many people believed that their dead family members were climbing out of their graves to kill relatives that the issue was addressed by incredulous academics and reporters in journals and newspaper articles.Īccording to Paul Barber, author of Vampires, Burial & Death, there are two types of vampires: folkloric and fictional. The creatures in these ancient myths eventually gave way to bloated folkloric vampires that spread disease and the charismatic fictional vampires that consume the living and give eternal life. Cultures all over the world have a version of a blood-sucking creature that returns from the grave to torment and feed on people. The vampire myth originates in ancient beliefs in demons or evil spirits who feed on the blood and flesh of the living. The Vampire by Sir Philip Burne-Jones, ca.

Vampires, Burial, and Death by Paul Barber