The zombies in the 1968 film "Night of the Living Dead" had a taste for flesh, but had not yet broadened their horizons to braaaiins. Zombies are what Amy Wilentz, an English professor at the University of California, Irvine, called a "New World phenomenon." People likely buried suspected vampires this way to keep them from emerging from the grave as revenants that could harm the living.įans of the hit TV show "The Walking Dead" may be interested to know that their favorite flesh-eating characters are based on some very real history - that of Haiti in the 17th and 18th centuries. dates back to the 1830s, according to Smithsonian Magazine. But people continued to bury suspected vampires this way into the 18th century in Poland, and a vampire grave discovered in Connecticut in the U.S. These strange graves, which sometimes also feature decapitated skeletons or skulls with bricks shoved between the jaws, may have originated in the Middle Ages, as early as the 11th century, when tales about vampires started to emerge in Europe, Betsinger said. Ancient Babylonians and Greeks may also have believed in these reanimated corpses, Tracy Betsinger, a bioarchaeologist at the State University of New York at Oneonta who has studied "vampire graves," told Live Science in 2014.Īrchaeologists have found evidence of so-called vampire burials - in which the body of the deceased is pinned to the earth with wooden stakes or iron bars - in countries such as Poland, Bulgaria and the United States. And some historians date vampires all the way back to the time of the ancient Egyptians, whose myths include references to demons summoned from other worlds. In China, there are jiangshi, evil spirits that attack people and drain their life energy. Many other regions and cultures share similarly creepy stories about vampirelike creatures.
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