Vampires, Burial, and Death by Paul Barber

Such signs were sometimes mistaken for proof of vampires. Intestinal decomposition creates bloating, which can force blood up into the mouth, making it look like a dead body has recently sucked blood. In this engrossing book, Paul Barber surveys centuries of folklore about vampires and offers the first scientific explanation for the origins of the vampire legends. Sometimes ordinary decomposition processes were mistaken for unusual or supernatural phenomenon.įor example, if a coffin is airtight, putrefaction might be delayed by weeks or months. Paul Barber, Vampires, Burial, and Death: Folklore and Reality. People would look for evidence that the body had been recently active, or tried to escape its coffin. Vampires have always represented the human fear of death. This would sometimes be done when a person died, though it was not uncommon for bodies to be exhumed days, weeks, or months later. The first is a prophylactic measure, preventing a dead person from becoming a vampire in the first place.

Folkloric beliefs offer many different protections against vampires, but there are two basic variations on vampire protection, depending on the circumstance. Villagers combined fear of the dead with their belief that something had cursed them and concluded that perhaps someone who had been recently buried might be responsible for their bad fortune, having come back from the grave with evil intent. According to anthropologist Paul Barber, author of 'Vampires, Burial, and Death,' (1988, Yale University Press) stories from nearly every culture have some localized version of the vampire, and 'bear a surprising resemblance to the European vampire.'

Relatively modern fictional vampires such as Dracula have little in common with the vampires that Europeans believed in - and protected themselves against - centuries ago.

Vampires, Burial, and Death by Paul Barber