Profs & Pints DC: Digging Up Vampires

Profs and Pints DC presents: “Digging Up Vampires,” on the origins and evolution of vampire beliefs, with Jordan Wilson, bioarchaeologist, skeletal biologist, and assistant professor at Georgetown University.

Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at h[ttps://events.ticketleap.com/tickets/profsandpints/dc-digging-up-vampires .]

Hollywood has taught many of us that vampires are alluring undead creatures that drink blood, recoil from garlic and crucifixes, and turn to dust in sunlight. The truth, however, is much creepier.

Venture into DC’s Penn Social to learn what we know about real vampire beliefs based on research by archeologists, forensic scientists, and psychologists.

Dr. Jordan Wilson, who gives excellent Profs and Pints talks, will discuss how vampires prowled long before Dracula emerged from Transylvania.

You’ll learn how folkloric traditions from the ancient Mediterranean and Middle East spoke of fears of restless dead, nocturnal demons, and spirits that preyed upon the living. In later Europe, fears of revenants and vampires took on new forms as disease outbreaks swept through communities and the exhumed dead were seen as having undergone mysterious transformations.

Drawing on mortuary archaeology and paleopathology, Dr. Wilson will examine real graves of individuals believed to be vampires, their skeletons found with stones in their mouths, iron stakes through their bodies, or sickles across their throats to prevent them from rising. She’ll explore what these burials reveal about fears of disease, death, and social marginalization, and how modern anthropology can help explain the beliefs that created them.

We’ll also investigate how sleep paralysis inspired encounters with demons, how diseases such as tuberculosis, cholera, and malaria contributed to vampire traditions, and how misunderstandings about decomposition convinced communities that the dead were feeding on the living.

You’ll emerge with an appreciation of how the real history of vampires is far stranger—and far more revealing of basic human fears—than the stories about vampires in popular culture. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. Talk starts 30 minutes later.)

Image: The skeleton of a suspected vampire buried with head between legs in Gliwice, Poland. (Photo by Andrzej Grygiel/EPA/Creative Commons.)