The growth of cities in Europe during the 16th and 17th centuries led to problems that all demanded new thinking to solve, such as sewage treatment, transportation, garbage collection, and overflowing cemeteries. The cemetery problem crept up gradually, as burial plots were centered around churches and were there presumably for eternity. When cemetery expansion became impossible and more people died, the earliest solutions were not the best.
When all the plots in a graveyard were full—as was happening more and more by the end of the 17th century—sextons added another layer, digging graves two, rather than the customary six, feet under. The bodies of the poor, or plague victims, were dumped, en masse, into pits. Most corpses were clad in only a fabric shroud as coffins were considered a luxury.
All it took for the dead to rise was a heavy rainstorm, a pack of marauding dogs, or a sloppy drunk gravedigger (see: Hamlet). Some were withered down to the bone while others appeared ruddy and well-fed, more lifelike than when they were gasping on their hollow-cheeked death-beds. Medical science failed to explain these such post-mortem anomalies but folk tradition had a name for the undecayed, revenant, from the French verb revenir, ‘to come back’. The Slavic term was ‘Vampyr’ or ‘upyr’.
A notorious case of an unearthed vampire in what is now Serbia led Europeans to diagnose these better-preserved corpses as vampires. Read how that happened and what it led to at Smithsonian.
(Image credit: Theodor Josef Hubert Hoffbauer)
