Paul Barber

Paul Barber is a research associate at the Fowler Museum of Cultural History at the University of California, Los Angeles, and is the author of Vampires, Burial, and Death: Folklore and Reality. In the following article, Barber argues that natural decomposition processes cause human corpses to exhibit some of the traditional symptoms of vampiric behavior related in eyewitness accounts and folklore. Decomposition can cause corpses to exhibit the pooling or leakage of blood, the sudden spasmodic movements of various muscles due to deterioration, and the unusual sounds of various gases escaping the body after death. Such phenomena would give a corpse the appearance of life. According to Barber, understanding decomposition processes provides an explanation for how people in ages past could have easily believed vampires to exist among their dead...