The Perils of Killing the Already Dead

"In 1250, King Eric IV of Denmark was murdered while visiting his brother, Abel Valdemarsen. Although Abel was suspected of arranging the killing, he swore that it wasn't so and became king himself. Less than two years later, when he set out to attack some peasants who weren't paying taxes, he himself was killed by a wheelwright. He was initially buried at the cathedral. But monks there complained that the slain king was walking around at night, frightening them with strange sounds."

"But fear of the difficult dead neither originated in nor has been confined to the nineteenth-century European re-imaginings of Vlad the Impaler. In what at times reads like the script of a Sam Raimi film that I don't quite want to watch, Blair writes of corpses that have been posthumously beheaded, or doused in boiling vinegar; of corpses with their death shrouds stuffed in their mouths or nailed down into their coffins; of staked hearts, removed jawbones, and legs twisted back and bound."

Fear of the unquiet dead prompted communities to physically re-kill corpses perceived as dangerous. Medieval and cross-cultural accounts record posthumous mutilations such as staking hearts, removing jawbones, beheading, boiling vinegar dousing, stuffing death shrouds into mouths, nailing coffins closed, and twisting and binding limbs. Specific cases include a murdered Danish king exhumed after monks reported nocturnal disturbances, with his body sunk in a bog and a stake driven through its chest. These interventions combined practical, ritual, and emotional motives and often involved heavy, socially proscribed labor on decaying bodies. Fear of the difficult dead neither originated with nineteenth-century vampire reimaginings nor ended with them.

Read at The New Yorker