Fear of what the dead might do to us didn’t start with Dracula, and it didn’t end with him, either.
Rivka Galchen for The New Yorker . In 1250, King Eric IV of Denmark was murdered while visiting his brother, Abel Valdemarsen. Although Abel was suspected of arranging the killing, he swore that it wasn’t so and became king himself. Less than two years later, when he set out to attack some peasants who weren’t paying taxes, he himself was killed by a wheelwright. He was initially buried at the cathedral. But monks there complained that the slain king was walking around at night, frightening them with strange sounds. The royal corpse was removed from the church and sunk in a bog, and a stake was run through its chest. In “ Killing the Dead: Vampire Epidemics from Mesopotamia to the New World ,” John Blair, a professor emeritus of medieval history and archeology at the University of Oxford, examines the many historical accounts of such corpse-killings, in which the already dead, perceived to be causing trouble, are “killed” again. Today, we typically associate su...
