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Vampires, Burial, and Death

Folklore and Reality

Paul Barber

Throughout the world there is a common be-

lief that the dead may return to life. In Europe

the most exotic form of this belief is the legend

of the vampire. In this engrossing book, Paul

Barber surveys centuries of folklore about

vampires—from the tale of a sixteenth-cen-

tury shoemaker from Breslau whose ghost ter-

rorized everyone in the city, to the testimony

of a doctor who presided over the exhumation

and dissection of a graveyard full of Serbian

vampires. Analyzing these reports, Barber of-

fers for the first time a scientific explanation

for the origin of the vampire legends.

The accounts compiled here by Barber of ex-

humations of suspected vampires include de-

scriptions of blood on the lips of the dead body,

how the corpse cried out when a stake was

driven into its heart, and how the corpse partly

rose from the grave. These descriptions led to

further assumptions about vampires; that after

coming to life again, they would prey on the

living, sucking their blood or killing them in

other ways. Barber studies the descriptions of

exhumed cadavers in light of what is now

known about forensic pathology and shows

that they are clinically possible.

Barber thus argues that the lore about vam-

pires is an elaborate folk-hypothesis that sought

to make sense out of a wide variety of natural

phenomena, including the events of decom-

position. His book will be fascinating reading

for scientists and anthropologists as well as for

everyone interested in folklore.

Paul Barber,

a former teacher of German lan-

guage and folklore at Princeton University and

Occidental College, is a writer.

Printed in the U.S.A.