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. The royal corpse was removed from the church and sunk in a bog, and a stake was run through its chest.

In “Killing the Dead: Vampire Epidemics from Mesopotamia to the New World,” John Blair, a professor emeritus of medieval history and archeology at the University of Oxford, examines the many historical accounts of such corpse-killings, in which the already dead, perceived to be causing trouble, are “killed” again. Today, we typically associate such quests with the figure of the vampire—an archetype that in popular culture lives mostly in fiction, such as Bram Stoker’s “Dracula.” 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. These attempts to keep down the unquiet dead were, besides being desecrations, exercises in a lot of heavy and often forbidden labor done on decaying bodies.

Imagining the depth of belief and the extremes of emotion that would motivate such difficult work puts one in touch with sense-making from the past. The cases in Blair’s book, however gruesome, catalogue methods that our species has used to manage terror, sorrow, and disbelief in the face of the irremediable and unpredictable arrival of death. The deceased individuals who were subjected to corpse-killing were not always once powerful and malevolent, like King Abel. Nor was the distress they caused limited to being doomed, as the ghost of Hamlet’s father says, to walk the night. Women who died in childbirth, young men who died in war, infants who died before baptism—these especially pitiable dead were sometimes thought to become terrors whom the living would need to finish off once and for all. Dead husbands and wives returned to seduce former spouses. People whose lives were cut short by plague or tuberculosis returned to bring the same illness upon their family members. The trouble that these dead were seen to cause sometimes corresponded to the suffering that they themselves experienced, and the remedies reveal something of the psychology of those who employed them. A wicked tenth-century judge who, in death, was seen walking around ultimately had his corpse exhumed, sealed in calfskin, and sunk in a lake, perhaps because the living needed convincing that such a cruel man no longer ruled over them.

In some cases, efforts to keep the dead from returning were relatively civil, maybe because the problems they caused, in life and in death, were not seen as so bad, or because their neighbors or leaders argued for restraint. Disparate responses can be seen even in nearby regions around the same time. In Roxburghshire, Scotland, in the twelfth century, a departed and “dissolute chaplain” who merely wandered around groaning was axed and burned, but in Buckinghamshire, England, a bishop dealt with a man who had got up from his grave and visited his wife by posthumously granting him absolution.

Sometimes people dictated their own punishment, detailing what should be done after they were dead. Some Morlachs—a group who lived in Dalmatia—were so worried about becoming walking dead that they asked their families to treat them in death as they would a vampire, a medieval variation on the advance directive. The thinking was that this would prevent them from returning with a thirst for the blood of their own children.

Among the more moving cases that Blair describes are those of people who in life were vulnerable and powerless but in death were considered formidable threats. In the ninth century, a severely disabled woman was buried, her feet bound, in an annex of the church in Elsau, outside Zürich. A year or more later, she was exhumed. Her skull was pulled off and turned sideways, boulders were piled atop her, and a mortar floor covered the grave she was returned to, leaving no indication of what lay below. What thinking could account for such extreme behavior? Though such cases were often distant in time and space, and cannot be summarily considered all together, they share the fact that the minds involved were human.

Slavic folklore about vampires suggests one partial answer to the especial fear of the vulnerable. The undead of these stories are often described as ugly, short, ruddy-complexioned, and dressed in rags; they look like beggars—completely unlike the refined Count Dracula. These earlier vampires appeared at your doorstep at night asking for aid. If one could believe that the needy person at the door was, in fact, a malicious spirit, then turning them away might not have felt so bad. Still, such solace contains the seeds of its own destruction: as these beliefs tip over, bit by bit, into the realm of superstition, it becomes possible to see how it’s only spooky tales that make us misperceive a pitiable person as an otherworldly danger. Stories may influence how we think, but they also present themselves as mere stories.

The Dracula of Bram Stoker’s novel, a sophisticated aristocrat, remains, like his forebears, an unwelcome stranger. He is an immigrant living in England who can’t survive without soil from his home country. He is accustomed to hard work, more so than some of his British victims; in his own castle, Dracula does the work of a butler, maid, coachman, and cook. But he is also a fictional character, a fiction maybe powerful enough to preclude any drive to act out such fears in real life.

Even hundreds of years ago, there were people who didn’t believe in the anxious accounts of what the dead were doing. They viewed corpse-killings as a crime, or at least as something to be discouraged. One Lutheran pastor, in a sermon at the grave of a plague victim in the sixteenth century, spoke directly to the issue, addressing the superstition of the time that there were dead women who, through “lip-smacking”—chewing motions made by corpses, which were likely the reason behind practices of removing jawbones or stuffing mouths with fabric—continued to harm the living:

As deaths have increased daily and risen to a peak, this worthy Christian matron now in our thoughts has come, through fruitless gossip, under a suspicion: that she is one of those female persons who lip-smack in the grave . . . and that as long as the lip-smacking continues, the mortality will grow worse and worse. And if we were to follow what has happened elsewhere, these people would have to be dug up, the veils and shrouds that they have eaten (I can’t think how) torn out, and their necks cut with a grave-spade, as has happened in places that I don’t want to name.

He goes on to say that to behead a corpse is to follow the path of Satan, and that it is God, not a lip-smacking corpse, who holds power over life and death. But the pastor seems to know that merely forbidding corpse-killing is not enough to stop it. The superstitious beliefs need to be undermined, to have their error made clear. Another Lutheran pastor explained to his parishioners how it was that they were being led to superstitious, destructive beliefs. It had to do with how the Devil hates women. The pastor explained that the Devil slanders and demeans these women by spreading the belief in lip-smacking, and that the Devil uses these beliefs to breed conflict in the community, “for it embitters and corrodes an honest friendship to dig up someone’s relative and cut off their head.” The pastor had another point, too: digging up the bodies of plague victims would spread the disease, also to the Devil’s delight.

These ways of dealing with the passed (and the past) can seem alien from the perch of the present. But contemporary society, too, abounds in questionable diagnoses of societal ills and unethical, ineffective, or dangerous proposed remedies. The demonization of immigrants in the U.S., for example, follows from false arguments that they are the primary perpetrators of violent crime. Autism, pandemics, school shootings, child abuse—all these problems are responded to by some in ways that differ only minimally from understanding illness as following from the lip-smacking of dead women. “Killing the Dead” is an archeological and anthropological study, but it is also a catalogue of how our predecessors wrestled with the problem of evil: Where do diseases come from, why do children die, why do villains rise to power?

Blair considers some more modern reports, including a few from the twentieth century. In a case from 1914 near the Polish border with Belarus, a priest ordered an exhumation of a corpse found to be face down with its fingers “all bitten as if he had been ‘eating himself.’ ” The priest prayed while the corpse’s head was cut off with a spade. “Thereafter, war, revolution, and collectivization devastated folk-culture,” Blair writes. Belief in corpses that return to bother the living mostly fell away, though a few practices remained: in 2007, a stake was driven through the grave of Slobodan Milošević, the former Serbian President.

After reading Blair’s book, I found the varied ways of killing the dead less like unsettling desecrations and more like emotionally recognizable mourning. Death, fear, and sorrow unify the disparate practices. In two essays published in 1915 as a book, “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death,” Sigmund Freud argued that the First World War was bringing about a shift in how Europeans thought about death. Of the beforetime, he writes, “To anyone who listened to us we were of course prepared to maintain that death was the necessary outcome of life, that everyone owes nature a death.” But this was a surface conviction. “In reality, however, we were accustomed to behave as if it were otherwise.” When a death does occur, “ it is as though we were badly shaken in our expectations.” The war, he argued, had made death undeniable: we “are forced to believe in it.” Since war—and death—will continue, he asks if something might be gained by letting go of our illusions, if this might make us as connected to life as to the idea of the imagined soldier returning home safely. Invoking the saying that to preserve peace, arm for war, he concludes, “If you want to endure life, prepare yourself for death.” ♦