I write an Edgar Allan Poe museum because there are three such institutions in the United States — four, if you count the small cottage in the Bronx where he spent the last years of his life. The Richmond museum boasts the largest collection of Poephemera in the country. There are manuscripts covered with his looping, butterfly script. Letters and a silk waistcoat. You can admire Poe’s soup ladle, gawp at his walking stick and boat hooks, even cast an eye over his socks. I bought his collected stories in the museum shop and flicked through them that evening, finally choosing one that was new to me. The Premature Burial (1844) is about a man who escapes pathological fear and returns to the state of humdrum discontent commonly known as sanity. I read it with interest, hoping to pick up some tips.

The man’s fear is particular. He is taphophobic — morbidly afraid of being buried alive. This is reasonable enough, as he’s given to cataleptic episodes that render him cold and lazy-pulsed for extended periods. He is haunted by the prospect that one of these fits will overcome him while he is away from those aware of his condition. It would only be a matter of time before some officious bystander had him boxed-up and buried. Then would come the macabre revival: “The unendurable oppression of the lungs — the stifling fumes of the damp earth — the clinging of the death garments — the rigid embrace of the narrow house…”

Our narrator prepares for the worst. He commissions the cosiest possible coffin, complete with a bell that can be pulled from within. He stipulates that the lid must not be screwed down and that a supply of food and drink should be left within the family crypt in case he wakes up peckish. And then one day he opens his eyes onto darkness and confinement and finds that he is not in his cosy coffin, that there is no bell-pull, that there is no way out. I won’t reveal the story’s conclusion here. But I was struck by the power of the tale, and by the realisation that it did not employ gibbering fiends or lonely castles. No, it derived its strength from the very real fears of the age.

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Forty years after The Premature Burial was published, a Welsh clergyman found that he had a corpse problem: one particular corpse was not doing what it was supposed to do. It was, quite literally, acting up.

Eleven years before, a 73-year-old woman had died in the village of Llanelly. The cause was recorded as “unknown” in the register of deaths. She was laid out for three days before burial in a brick tomb that had been designed to accommodate two coffins. Hers was the first. In 1884, the tomb was opened to allow the interment of a relative, only for the gravedigger to uncover a disturbing scene.

The coffin’s lid had been “forced upwards”, creating a gap of about eight inches between casket and lid. The corpse’s right arm and right leg protruded through the gap so that they hung over the edge of the coffin, with the right knee pressed against the tomb’s interior wall. It was as if the dead woman had attempted to climb out of her own resting place.

There seemed only one conceivable explanation — a terrible mistake had been made 11 years before. And so, in May 1884, the Revd. David Williams wrote to Britain’s foremost medical journal, The Lancet: “Will any of your readers give me the benefit of their opinion as to whether the following was a case of being buried alive?”

The Vicar of Llanelly did not have to wait long for an answer. On 7 June, The Lancet published two responses to his query. Somewhat unhelpfully, they took entirely opposing views on the matter. Charles Williams, District Medical Officer of the Bodmin Union, thought the question ridiculous and said that the events at Llanelly were due to an explosive build-up of the “gases generated during putrefaction”. Dr William O’Neill of Lincoln was less optimistic. He was so convinced that live burial was a real danger that he argued interment should not take place until a doctor had formally certified evidence of decomposition in the cadaver.

Not all the responses were of a scientific character. One in particular had more in common with Poe’s fiction than medical debate. On 14 June, The Lancet published the reminiscences of a traveller who claimed to have seen evidence of live burial in the cathedral crypt at Bordeaux. There some recently uncovered corpses in remarkable states of preservation were displayed on iron frames. He was shown two bodies that left him in no doubt as to the risks of over-hasty inhumation:

“I am unable to attribute the position in which they were found in their coffins, and the look of horror which their faces still displayed, to any action of rigor mortis or any other post-mortem change, but simply and solely to their having awakened to a full appreciation of their most awful position… In the year 1870 these two bodies were still on view; and the attendants used to dwell at some length upon the horrors of being interred alive.”

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In the end, the Revd Williams accepted the explosive gas theory, no doubt grateful that he would be able to calm his worried flock with a reassuringly scientific explanation. The fact that one letter provoked such a range of responses is telling. Dr Williams’s rational appraisal. Dr O’Neill’s cautious pessimism. The ghoulish rubbernecking of the tourist. It was a subject that intrigued and appalled, that fed Victorian passions for both science and the macabre.

Yet fear is a slave to fashion. As the physician Jan Bondeson has shown in his gripping book on the subject, concern about live burial among the general population seems to have declined rapidly after the First World War. The age of mechanised warfare had given people quite enough to worry about above ground.

You might think that live burial is now the sole preserve of horror fiction and Tarantino films; that the anxieties of the Revd Williams are nothing but a macabre footnote. After all, we are no longer reliant on the judgments of port-sodden sawbones. We have the full beeping arsenal of modern medicine to track our journey into the dark. What could go wrong?

Rather a lot, it seems. Examples of near misses in our own age are not difficult to find. A woman who woke up in a Polish morgue in 2009. An Australian man who tried to escape his body bag in 2022. A woman in Ecuador who started banging on the coffin during her own wake last June. Two weeks ago, on Friday 13 October, paramedics in County Durham declared a man deceased, only for staff at Darlington Memorial Hospital to discover that he was still alive.

Such incidents are rare enough to be newsworthy. But they do make you wonder. Bondeson ends his book with a chapter entitled “Are people still being buried alive?” The answer is: perhaps, in an extremely limited set of circumstances. Apparently, the main situation every taphophobe should avoid is a surfeit of drugs or alcohol in sub-zero temperatures ­— extreme intoxication and hypothermia form the combination most likely to fox an exhausted medic.

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Bondeson relates his own experience of treating a woman who had enjoyed several bottles of vodka while sitting on her freezing balcony. The police who brought her to hospital assumed that she had passed away. In fact her heart was still beating, though so slowly as to be almost imperceptible. Bondeson managed to revive the patient, noting that “her marked obesity, isolating the inner organs from the cold, was probably to be thanked for the fortunate outcome of this case”.

Bondeson’s anecdote fascinates because it underlines the role of chance. All tales of live burial do, whether they take the form of creepy fiction or learned debates in The Lancet. When Pliny the Elder wrote of men who had awoken on their own funeral pyres, he bemoaned fortune’s vicissitudes, “so much so, that we cannot be sure of any thing, no, not even that a person is dead”. The fear is greater than the horror of premature burial. It lies in the knowledge that such tragedies might have been averted had the funeral been delayed by a day, an hour. This is the dreadful if only that torments Poe’s taphophobe. He imagines the cruelty of the “memory of dear friends who would fly to save us if but informed of our fate, and with consciousness that of this fate they can never be informed…”

Live burial remains the most awful fate imaginable. Not because it is especially likely. Not even because of the grisly details. But because it disrupts our fond dreaming of an ordered world, in which death and life are cleanly separated by six feet of earth.

In the shadow of Bran Castle, once home to Vlad the Impaler, you might enjoy the irony of hearing this revisionist history lesson while surrounded by a whole gallery of vampire kitsch — kiosks with plastic fangs for sale; a Dracula face-in-a-hole board as diminutive and unthreatening as his descendants Count Chocula, of breakfast-cereal fame, or Sesame Street’s own Count von Count.

Listening to such lectures in the past, I would often find myself unable to suppress that exclamation, so completely taboo in our era of stay-in-your-lane deference: “Well, actually…” Because the truth is that tales of vampires existed in the Balkans long before Bram Stoker. Between the 15th and the 19th centuries, the figure of the vampire made the gradual transition from the proto-ethnography of the Balkans to the imaginations of Gothic littérateurs.

Most succinctly, we may say that the figure of the vampire emerges out of the confluence of three elements. The first is the real historical record of the actions of a certain Vlad Țepeș (1428/31—1476/77). The violent transgressions for which he became notorious were extreme — notably, impalement on rounded and greased spikes, carefully avoiding direct puncture of inner organs so as to prolong the victim’s misery. Woodcuts depicting his deeds were soon published in German books, and as these circulated the legends surrounding him grew beyond all human proportion.

The second element is the arrival of Germanophone Habsburg administrators in newly subordinated regions of Southeastern Europe, who had been influenced in their practices by the emerging culture of the Republic of Letters, which encouraged literate travellers in little-known places to note down and to report back to the metropole all rare or mysterious incidents. The third element, finally, are the ancient folk-cultural practices and beliefs that these humble clerks observed and documented.

Of particular importance in the revisionist lesson for foreigners in Transylvania is the task of clearing Dracula from any association with vampirism. “Dracula”, they explain, is simply the title, but not the name, of Vlad Țepeș, also known as Vlad III or Vlad the Impaler. He inherited it from his father, Vlad II, a member of the Order of the Dragon. In Romanian, dracul derives from the Latin draco, and simply means “the dragon”.

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It is not in fact in the castles, but in the villages of Romania that we typically hear rumours of the strigoi, which are in turn close cousins of the vrykolakas of Greece and the upior of the Slavic countries. These are, in all their regional variants, ghosts of the deceased, poltergeists who return to trouble the living. A common belief holds that one may prevent their apparition by sealing the coffin of the dead shut with extra nails, and by driving a stake through the chest of the corpse. Should one encounter a strigoi, some texts and traditions counsel the use of apotropaics such as garlic or holy water to ward them off. These folkloric characters thus share some, but not all, of the traits associated with the Stokerian vampire. There is as yet no strong association with bats, for example, or with hematophagy.

It is at least true, then, that Stoker’s rendition bumps the vampire up several social classes from where it had always resided in “authentic” folk culture, from the peasantry to the aristocracy. And it is the elevation of traditional village practices to a form of aristocratic decadence that enables Stoker to give his fiction a historical grounding, and to identify his own protagonist’s vampirism as part of an inheritance from none other than Vlad the Impaler:

“Who was it but one of my own race who as Voivode [a military leader] crossed the Danube and beat the Turk on his own ground? This was a Dracula indeed! Woe was it that his own unworthy brother, when he had fallen, sold his people to the Turk and brought the shame of slavery on them! Was it not this Dracula, indeed, who inspired that other of his race who in a later age again and again brought his forces over the great river into Turkey-land?”

In portraying Vlad as a hero in the war against the Turks, the Irish novelist is channelling a historiographical tendency more commonly seen in Russia and the Balkans than in Western Europe. In the Orthodox lands, while his cruelty is acknowledged, Vlad is mostly seen as a valiant defender against the Ottoman menace, and therefore as a bulwark of Christendom. In the German-speaking world, by contrast, his significance as a military leader pales in comparison with his inhuman and gratuitous cruelty. Beginning as early as the 1460s, broadsides circulated describing the delight Vlad took in roasting babies alive and forcing their mothers to eat them, in hearing the low moans of his impaled victims as musical accompaniment to his meals.

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Horrific tales of Vlad the Impaler were not the only source of vampire mythology. Non-fictional writing on strange incidents and curiosities stretches back to antiquity, but it is in the wake of the scientific revolution that a more systematic approach develops to the collection of eyewitness reports, largely inspired by the learned journal of the Royal Society of London, The Philosophical Transactions, founded in 1666.

The first extant treatise on vampirism is De masticatione mortuorum in tumulis [On the Chewing of the Dead in their Tombs], published in 1725, by the German Lutheran pastor and historian Michaël Ranfft. In his work, Ranfft helped to make vampires known throughout the German-speaking world by republishing a report from a minor administrator in the Serbian provinces of the Kingdom of Hungary, who described some peculiar events in the village of Kisolova following the death of a certain Petar Blagojević, of whom “it was stated that, within eight days [of his death], nine people, both old and young, died after enduring an illness of 24 hours”. It is reported that: “As they still lay alive on their death beds… the above-mentioned Plogojovitz [sic], who had died ten weeks prior, came to them in their sleep, lay down on top of them, and croaked that they must now give up their souls.”

The author of the report cited by Ranfft uses the word “vampire” in one of its earliest printed occurrences. He reports that “since among similar people (as are called Vampyri) there must be visible various signs, as that their bodies are undecayed, with skin, hair, beard, and nails growing”, the villagers resolved to open up the grave of Petar Blagojević and to see what they might discover there. Here is what they found:

“That, first of all, the body and its grave were not in the least touched by the usual smell of the dead. The body, other than the nose, which had somewhat fallen off, was very fresh; the hair and the beard, and also the nails, of which the older ones had fallen away, had grown on him; the old skin, which was somewhat white, had peeled away, and a new fresh skin had come forth underneath; the face, hands and feet, and the whole body were so composed that they could not have been more perfect during the course of his life. Not without surprise I glimpsed fresh blood in his mouth, which, according to the common expression, he had sucked from those he had killed.”

At issue in part was a puzzlement about some unexpected contingencies in the way bodies decompose. While they often rot quickly, depending on the circumstances of the air, the temperature, and the presence of microorganisms, bodies can also come to appear, under the right conditions, even more healthy than they had been just prior to death. Sometimes a corpse is found with blood streaming from the mouth, a natural consequence of the internal breakdown of the organs, which nonetheless can easily be mistaken for a vestige of recent feasting. They frequently become bloated, and in an era in which corpulence was still strongly associated with health, this temporary condition could easily appear as an improvement only to be explained on the assumption that the corpse had been ingesting food — food, that is, or blood.

The difficulty of determining the precise boundary between life and death is a subject that reappears throughout the 18th century — not just in reference to vampires, but in numerous medical treatises. The most interesting example of such work is undoubtedly the Danish-French physician Jacques-Bénigne Winslow’s 1742 Dissertation on the Uncertainty of the Signs of Death, and the Misuse of Burials, and Rushed Embalmings. Winslow cites several authorities to establish the view that “putrefaction is the only infallible sign of death”.

Winslow also peppers his treatise with macabre reports, many of which read like Gothic fiction. Thus we learn of a lady of Auxbourg, who, “falling into a Syncope, in Consequence of a Suffocation of the Matrix, was buried in a deep Vault, without being covered with Earth… Some Years after, however, one of the same Family happening to die, the Vault was open’d, and the Body of the young Lady found on the Stairs at its Entry, without any Fingers on the Right Hand.” Soon enough, documentary sources such as this were sublimated into fictional stories about the undead, Edgar Allen Poe’s The Premature Burial (1844) being a prime example.

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The early modern explosion of interest in Balkan “superstition” is, as we have begun to see, in no small measure an effect of the encounter between the Catholic and Orthodox worlds, and in particular of the expansion of Habsburg rule into regions of the Balkans that had previously belonged to the Ottoman Empire. This encounter triggered a long — and indeed still ongoing — habit of representing Southeastern Europe as a land of benighted and backwards belief.

In his contribution to the 1776 Dictionnaire philosophique, none other than Voltaire, who never misses an opportunity to scoff at people who happen not to be French, takes up the example of vampires not only as a measure of the distance between Enlightened Europe and those other parts, but also between the rationality of the ancient Greeks and the irrationality of their degenerated modern descendants. “Who would believe that the fashion of vampires came from Greece? This is not the Greece of Alexander, of Aristotle, of Plato, of Epicurus, of Demosthenes, but rather Christian Greece, which is, unfortunately, schismatic.”

Voltaire is a defiant atheist, but his polemical anti-clericalism brings him close to some of the themes of anti-Papism familiar from Protestant lands. For many Protestant authors, the difference between Catholicism and worship of the forces of darkness is but another case of the narcissism of minor differences. Voltaire, writing in this same spirit, speaks mockingly of a young sceptic who had dared to question the truth of a number of reported miracles involving the Virgin Mary, and who finally was won over to all manner of Catholic articles of faith as a result of exposure to folk-beliefs about vampires. In his satirical account, it was best for the weak-minded to shelter themselves from stories of vampires, if only because these can all too easily serve as a gateway drug to the Roman religion.

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Among Catholic authors, by contrast, we generally see not mockery of folk-beliefs about vampires, but rather a subtle, almost mischievous, effort to occupy the ambiguous space between affirmation and scepticism. Indeed, a convention emerges in vampirological works over the course of the 18th century, whereby the author is generally presented as an intrepid and dedicated, but perhaps somewhat shadowy character. This doubt is in turn offset by an assurance that the author is a man of the cloth, an abbey or a clergyman who has immersed himself in the study of dark forces in order to better combat them for the sake of humanity’s salvation. Which side, a reader constantly wonders, is the author really on?

Whether writing as a science-oriented debunker, or as a pious fighter against the forces of darkness, or indeed as some mixture of these two, vampirologists always seem to be infected by their subject. Sceptics will see them as frivolous for wasting their intellectual energy on an old folk myth, and the pious will see them as rather too interested, for suspicious reasons, in the very thing they are supposed to be fighting against. It is hard to be taken seriously as a vampirologist.

And yet it still seems to me that vampires are due a certain measure of rehabilitation. The vampire, I think, is at least as “good to think with” as the “philosophical zombie” that has historically been preferred by analytic philosophers. Zombies give us all of the conceptual problems about mind and consciousness, but none of the feeling, and are thus perfect water-carriers for whatever it is the analytics are trying to do. To “think with vampires” is by contrast to think about feeling, mood, and the dimensions of human existence these disclose.

In its essence, a vampire is a being that knows it is dead, and feels infinite sadness about its plight. This is a paradoxical situation to be in, since death is supposed to be the cessation of all consciousness. But it is also fairly close to what we imagine when we try, per impossibile, to imagine death. We do so, mostly, by feeling our way into it, until we can bear no more and recoil. We do so by allowing what that feeling discloses to us to count for something. And also in our dreams, notably, we encounter dead people with surprising regularity. They walk and talk, and give us tidings, yet there’s something off about them, by which we understand that they are dead. An impossible condition — yet there they are.