In the 1700s, People Reportedly Drank a Suspected Vampire's Blood

In the 17th and 18th centuries, fear of vampires reached extraordinary heights, and the printed tales about them became extreme. People who believed a dead neighbour was rising from the grave did not stop at chopping off heads or laying sickles across necks. They also reportedly ate a suspected vampire's organs and drank its blood, sometimes mixed with vodka, hoping to stop the dead from harming the living.

What was done to a body that might rise

The account comes from an excerpt of the book "Killing the Dead: Vampire Epidemics from Mesopotamia to the New World", written by the historian John Blair, an emeritus professor of medieval history and archaeology at the University of Oxford. Blair describes a whole set of measures taken against people believed to be vampires:

• Some chopped the deceased person's head off.
• Others placed sickles across their necks.
• Many were placed face down in their graves.
• In one grave in Poland, the remains of a boy were found with an iron padlock around his foot.

Another burial in Poland was found with a ploughshare, the heavy blade of a plough, driven through the person's chest. Alongside these measures, the tales described something stranger still: eating the organs of a suspected vampire and drinking its blood, which the account's headline refers to as "drinking the corpse's blood mixed with vodka". The account calls this a purported practice, meaning it is what the stories claimed rather than something presented as proven.

Printing turned scattered stories into a shared fear

Blair traces how the printing press changed the way these stories travelled. Occasional early references were followed by a group of theological and philosophical discussions between about 1580 and 1610. From the 1670s, the volume of printed academic and historical debate and commentary grew steadily, reaching a climax in 1732. By then the word "vampire" was still relatively new, and the reading public had been fed so much fragmented and repetitive discussion that it wanted a proper textbook on the subject.

The monk who collected the stories

That demand was met in 1746, when the Benedictine scholar Dom Augustin Calmet, a monk and researcher, published his survey of supernatural beings. The book was quickly reissued in several editions, including an English one in 1759. Its section on vampires became the most influential academic work on the subject ever published, according to Blair, and its straightforward, evidence-based approach stood out after a long series of increasingly derivative works.

Calmet's book inspired a large family of followers and popularisers who carried the stories to a much wider readership. One example is "Histoire des vampires et des spectres malfaisants" — History of Vampires and Malevolent Specters — a pocketbook published in 1820 that repackaged Calmet for the mass market. Blair notes that Calmet's book remains the ultimate source of much modern vampire literature in Europe and America, both fictional and supposedly historical.