Where Vampires Actually Came From

Long before anyone said the word “vampire,” people were already burying their dead wrongly on purpose.

The fear seems to go back further than most people expect. Some of the earliest blood-drinking spirits show up in ancient Mesopotamian and Babylonian mythology, in stories about restless demonic spirits called ekimmu that returned to drain the life from the living. Centuries later, the Greeks had their own version. In Greek folklore, Lamia was a queen transformed into a monster by Hera, said to wander at night and prey on children out of grief for her own lost ones, and by the Hellenistic period she’d taken on a new dimension, seducing young men and draining their life while they slept. These weren’t campfire stories exactly. People genuinely organized their burial customs around keeping something like this from happening to them. 

The version most of us actually picture, pale skin, fangs, a coffin, a fear of sunlight, didn’t come from any of that directly. It crystallised much later and much more specifically. The earliest written reference to something resembling a vampire comes from an Old Russian text dated to 1047 A.D., but the word “vampire” itself is surprisingly young. It didn’t make its debut in writing until 1725, right around the time Eastern Europe had a genuine, documented episode of mass panic over the idea that the dead were getting up and feeding on their neighbours. 

That panic had a real trigger, and it wasn’t superstition dreamed up from nothing. During what’s sometimes called the Great Vampire Epidemic, roughly 1725 to 1755, vampire myths spread rapidly across the continent as disease swept through Eastern Europe and communities looked for something to blame. Villagers dug up their own family members and performed what were essentially exorcisms on corpses: staking the body, packing it in garlic, and treating the grave itself as something that needed to be neutralised. What made this spread beyond the region is almost funny in hindsight. Austrian and German soldiers fighting the Ottomans witnessed these mass grave openings firsthand and carried the stories home with them to Western Europe, which is basically how a regional folk practice turned into a continental obsession.

Here’s the part that actually explains most of it: decomposing bodies do strange, unsettling things, and nobody in the 18th century understood the biology behind any of it. A corpse can bloat with gas and look disturbingly “fed.” Skin can pull back from the nails and hair in a way that makes them look like they’ve grown. None of this requires anything supernatural, but if you’re a frightened villager standing over your neighbour’s exhumed body during a disease outbreak, it’s exactly the kind of detail that confirms whatever you already feared.

You can watch this exact process happen in America, decades later than most people realise. In Exeter, Rhode Island, in the winter of 1892, a farmer named George Brown had already buried his wife and one daughter to tuberculosis when his son Edwin started showing symptoms too. Neighbours convinced Brown to let them exhume his family, and when they opened the graves, the two women buried years earlier had decomposed normally. But his daughter Mercy, who’d only been in the ground a few months over a cold winter, had not. A doctor was present specifically to examine the bodies for what the town believed might be a vampire among them. Cold weather preservation was the actual explanation. It didn’t matter. Her heart still had blood in it, which the crowd took as proof she was feeding on her brother, so they cut it out, burned it, and mixed the ashes into water for Edwin to drink. He died two months later anyway. 

That single case is documented well enough that historians now treat it as a genuine window into 19th century American folk medicine, and it wasn’t isolated. Tuberculosis was called consumption at the time because it appeared to consume a person from the inside, and because it spread easily within families, it looked exactly like something was passing from the dead to the living. People weren’t being irrational by the standards of the explanations available to them. They were watching family members die in sequence, and for some communities, the vampire was a model that made the pattern make sense. 

The aristocratic, seductive vampire we know from fiction is a much later graft onto all of this. Bram Stoker’s Dracula, published in the late 19th century, is largely responsible for popularizing the modern vampire and establishing tropes that are still in use today, and Stoker drew inspiration for the character from Vlad III, a 15th century prince of Wallachia known for impaling his enemies. Interestingly, Mercy Brown’s exhumation was covered by a reporter and the story spread as far as England, close enough in timing to Stoker’s writing that some historians think it may have influenced the novel directly. 

What strikes me most about all of this isn’t the monster. It’s how consistently the vampire shows up right where medical explanation runs out. Mesopotamians didn’t understand why people wasted away. Eastern Europeans in the 1700s didn’t understand contagion. In Rhode Island in 1892, older folk explanations could still survive alongside modern medicine. Every version of the vampire is really just a name people gave to a gap in their own knowledge, and the ritual that followed, staking, burning, feeding ashes to the sick, was less about killing a monster than about doing something, anything, in the face of a death nobody could otherwise explain.

Writer’s Bio

Steffanie Edwins is a Swedish-based poet and author, whose work includes themes of nature, identity, mortality, culture, and history. She writes in Swedish, English, Ibo, and Irish, and her work has been published in six literary magazines.

When not writing, she can be found at ice skating rinks, the closest library, or simply hanging out with her rabbit, Oliver.