Month: October 2026

Deviant Burials: What Archaeologists Actually Find When They Dig Up a Vampire

· October 10, 2026
Archaeological excavation trench with string grid, trowels and a corroded iron sickle on a finds tray

Most of what we know about vampire belief comes from written sources: trial records, church complaints, travellers’ reports, the folklorists who arrived in the nineteenth century with notebooks. All of it is filtered through someone. Archaeology is the one line of evidence that is not — a grave is a thing people did, not a … Read more

Lilitu and Lamashtu: Mesopotamia’s Child-Stealing Demons and the Oldest Layer of All

· October 10, 2026
Ancient Mesopotamian bronze amulet plaque and cuneiform tablets lit by oil lamp

Every popular history of vampires eventually reaches back to Mesopotamia and announces that the vampire begins with Lilith. I have read a fair number of those books, and I want to do something slightly different here: set out what the cuneiform material actually contains, and be honest about where the chain of descent is solid … Read more

Lamia, Empusa and the Strix: The Classical Ancestors of the Vampire

· October 10, 2026
Owl perched on a broken marble column among moonlit classical ruins

People often tell me the vampire is a Slavic invention that Bram Stoker dressed up in evening wear. The Slavic part is where the word comes from, and Stoker certainly did the dressing. But the creature — a night-flying, blood-drinking, child-threatening female figure — was already fully formed in Greek and Roman sources more than … Read more

The New England Vampire Panic: Mercy Brown and America’s Consumption Graves

· October 10, 2026
Snow-covered nineteenth-century New England graveyard with slate headstones and bare trees at dusk

The last well-known vampire exhumation in the United States happened in 1892, in Exeter, Rhode Island, and it was reported in the newspapers. That fact still stops me. We tend to file vampire panics away in a distant Balkan past, comfortably remote. Mercy Brown was disinterred nine years after the Brooklyn Bridge opened. What Actually … Read more

Tlahuelpuchi: Mexico’s Shape-Shifting Blood Witch of Tlaxcala

· October 10, 2026
Moonlit adobe village in rural Tlaxcala with a glowing bird silhouette above the rooftops

Of every vampire tradition I have followed over twenty-five years, the tlahuelpuchi of rural Tlaxcala is the one that unsettles me most — not because it is the strangest, but because it is the best documented. Most vampire folklore reaches us through a haze of second-hand retellings and eighteenth-century pamphlets. The tlahuelpuchi was recorded in … Read more