Where do vampires come from? National Geographic TV tonight

Long-time National Geographic staff historian Mark Jenkins' new book, Vampire Forensics, is the basis for a new National Geographic Explorer television special premiering in the U.S. Tuesday night at 10 p.m. ET/PT on the National Geographic Channel. With apologies to Anne Rice's The Vampire Lestat, Jenkins shares some of what he learned on the trail of vampires.

Where did the belief in vampires originate?

Fear of the walking dead is old. Sucking blood isn't always part of it--sometimes they eat you, sometimes they just beat you up. There's some sort of deep layer of belief that crops up here and there, possibly something shared once in the Indo-European past that survived when the tribes became separate nations.

In twelfth-century England, William of Newburgh, a fairly good historian, wrote about prodigies, oddities well beyond the natural course of events. When you read his stories, they're pretty much about vampires and related characters--people who die in sin and come back as nasty monsters, like what we would call zombies today, spreading disease with them through the town.

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