The Archaeology of Zombies, Vampires, and Ghosts

This video essay from the channel Dig. examines how ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern societies sought protection from revenants, ghosts, and blood-drinking spirits through burial customs, amulets, and stories.

The first eight minutes focus on Cyprus, using the Late Aceramic Neolithic village of Khirokitia, dated to roughly the seventh millennium BC, as a case study for the fear of revenants. The narrator describes the settlement on a steep southern-coast escarpment, with round buildings clustered around small courtyards, grinding installations, hearths, and an enclosure wall. Every excavated building held intramural burials dug beneath the plastered floors, totalling between 175 and 240 individuals of all ages and both sexes. While most bodies lay on their sides in simple pits, about a dozen depart from the norm, and nearly fifty had heavy stones placed over the head or chest. Framing this within the archaeological concept of deviant burial and necrophobia, the narrator examines two contemporaneous interments in Tholos 17: Burial 3, an adult male wearing a shell and stone bead necklace with a large quern on his chest, and Burial 2, an eight- or nine-year-old boy placed on his stomach with his limbs bound behind him, partially inside a broken stone bowl. Excavators interpret the child as a foundation ritual or sacrifice accompanying the adult, while scholars suggest that heavy stones were placed on corpses to prevent the dead from rising.

The rest of the video turns to Pliny the Younger's haunted house in Athens, the seventh-century BC Arslan Tash amulets, and Philostratus's story of Apollonius saving a young man from an empousa at Corinth.