Vampires, Zombies, and Ghouls: The Strange Religious History of Halloween Monsters
Some of my favorite childhood memories involve Halloween in rural Missouri, back when a homemade costume, a pillowcase full of candy, and a little imagination were all we needed for a fun-filled evening. I've written before about those early Halloweens, particularly my fascination with Frankenstein's monster and the deliciously frightening stories that accompanied the season. There was something wonderful about being scared when you knew you were perfectly safe, especially when the evening ended with a mountain of candy and the reassuring familiarity of home.
As I grew older, my enthusiasm for Halloween only increased, as did my ambitions. For nearly two decades, my family, friends, and I hosted haunted Halloween hayrides, complete with elaborate themes, original scripts, period costumes, special effects, pyrotechnics, and enough homemade food to feed a small army. We spent months planning and rehearsing these productions, turning familiar stretches of rural Missouri countryside into scenes populated by ghosts, monsters, murderers, and whatever other unfortunate creatures our imaginations could conjure up. Looking back, I sometimes wonder how we managed to pull it all off, particularly since most of us had ordinary jobs and lives to attend to between bouts of theatrical madness.
And I certainly cannot reminisce about those years without giving a special shoutout to the wonderful family members, friends, and volunteers who helped make those hayrides possible. Our actors and haunters endured costumes, makeup, unpredictable weather, and long evenings spent lurking in the darkness, waiting for another wagonload of unsuspecting victims to rattle down the trail. Equally important were the people who came out year after year, ate our food, laughed at our antics, and occasionally screamed themselves silly. Those were some wonderful Halloweens, and I remain grateful to everyone who helped create those memories.
Perhaps that explains why, even now, I have a particular affection for the creatures that emerge every October. Vampires, zombies, witches, ghosts, werewolves, and assorted things that go bump in the night have always seemed like entertaining products of humanity's wonderfully overactive imagination. But after spending the past several years exploring the stranger corners of ancient Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, I've discovered that some of our familiar Halloween monsters have histories considerably older and more religiously complicated than I ever imagined.
In fact, some of these creatures were once taken seriously by people, even some very modern people, whose religious lives would look surprisingly familiar to ours. Medieval Christian writers recorded accounts of corpses climbing out of their graves, Greek Orthodox communities developed elaborate explanations for the restless dead, and Muslim storytellers warned of shape-shifting creatures that lured travelers to their deaths. Jewish traditions preserved stories of dangerous nighttime spirits, while Christian accounts of demons and possession contributed other recognizable features to our modern supernatural imagination.
So, in honor of Halloween, I thought we might wander through a few of these ancient stories and talk about just how much of our modern monster collection has roots in the religious world of our ancestors. And as it turns out, the old stories are sometimes considerably stranger than the movies.
The Greek Orthodox Vampire: When the Dead Refused to Stay Dead
Let's begin with vampires, because I suspect most of us associate them with Dracula, Transylvania, and the familiar assortment of fangs, coffins, and unfortunate victims with suspicious marks on their necks. Bram Stoker's 1897 novel helped establish much of the vampire imagery that eventually became standard Halloween fare, although he drew upon centuries-old European traditions. What shocked me was discovering just how deeply some of those traditions became entangled with Eastern Orthodox Christianity, particularly in Greece.
The Greeks had their own version of the vampire, generally called the vrykolakas, although the name and associated beliefs varied considerably across regions and historical periods. Unlike our modern romantic vampires, these creatures were usually described as disturbing, sometimes swollen or unnaturally preserved corpses that had somehow become active after burial. They might wander through villages, frighten their former neighbors, knock on doors, attack the living, or bring illness and misfortune to entire communities. Drinking blood was not always part of their behavior, and some accounts sound considerably closer to what we would now call a zombie or revenant than to Count Dracula.
The Greek stories developed within a religious culture that took death, burial, and the fate of the soul very seriously. Orthodox Christianity teaches that death separates the soul from the body, that the dead await the resurrection, and that the body deserves reverent treatment because the human person is more than a disposable collection of flesh and bones. In traditional Greek communities, burial customs reflected these beliefs, and in some places it was customary to reopen graves after several years and gather the remaining bones for placement in an ossuary. The expectation was that the body would have decomposed naturally, leaving bones that could be respectfully collected and preserved.
But what happened when the body had not decomposed? Here, Christian beliefs and older popular traditions sometimes became tangled together in ways that would have made for an excellent Halloween hayride. In some communities, an unusually preserved corpse raised suspicions that the deceased had been excommunicated, had died under a curse, or had committed some terrible offense that prevented the body from finding its proper rest. The connection with excommunication was particularly important because the Orthodox Church possessed the authority to bind and loose sins, a concept grounded in passages such as Matthew 16:19 and 18:18. Over time, popular interpretations sometimes transformed this spiritual authority into something disturbingly physical, suggesting that a person bound by an unresolved religious condemnation might remain literally bound in death.
This belief became associated with the vrykolakas, although the connection was never as simple as an official declaration that excommunicated Christians would become vampires. Greek folklore scholar Nikolaos Politis collected numerous traditions involving restless corpses, and later researchers have examined how these stories reflected local fears, burial practices, religious expectations, and social tensions. The stories reveal a world in which spiritual wrongdoing, community relationships, and the condition of a dead person's body were sometimes understood as parts of the same mysterious problem.
Occasionally, the proposed solutions were just as unsettling as the alleged problem. Some traditions prescribed prayers or religious intervention, while others described opening graves, dismembering suspected vampires, and burning their remains. These were hardly stories that disappeared with the arrival of Christianity, either. The fear of suspected vampires persisted in Greek communities for centuries, and religious authorities were still addressing the practice of opening graves and burning bodies in the nineteenth century.
In fact, the Orthodox Church had been confronting the problem for centuries. St. Nikodemos the Hagiorite, an influential Greek Orthodox monk and theologian of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, was particularly outspoken about the practice. In his commentary on a canon of St. Basil concerning grave robbers, he dismissed the idea that dead bodies could become wandering vampires. He condemned those who dug up suspected vrykolakes to mutilate or burn them. In his view, such people deserved punishment as grave robbers and murderers, regardless of what they imagined the deceased had become.
And apparently the problem persisted, because an 1867 Greek Orthodox manual for priests included an entire section devoted to people who burned suspected vampires. It prescribed at least six years without Communion for those who burned the bodies and were covered in their smoke, recommending prayers, holy water, and other religious rites instead. Interestingly, the author apparently accepted that demonic forces could animate the dead, but still insisted that the remains belonged to a human being who would face the final resurrection. Whatever had supposedly happened to the deceased, destroying the body was treated as a serious religious offense.
I have to say, I never expected to discover that Orthodox priests once needed written instructions for dealing with people who were digging up and burning suspected vampires. Even more surprising was discovering that religious authorities did not necessarily agree about whether such creatures could exist.
There is another complication involving the preservation of bodies, because incorrupt remains can carry a very different meaning within Catholic and Orthodox Christian traditions. Some saints have been associated with bodies that appeared unusually resistant to decomposition, although the significance and investigation of such claims differ across traditions and individual cases. The condition of a corpse, therefore, could be interpreted very differently depending upon its circumstances, the reputation of the deceased, and the beliefs of the surrounding community. Natural burial conditions, of course, can also preserve bodies in ways that earlier observers did not fully understand.
Orthodoxy teaches the resurrection of the dead and the continuing spiritual reality of the human person, but it does not teach that an excommunicated individual becomes a wandering corpse. Nor does the preservation of a body establish anything certain about the condition of the soul. The vrykolakas belongs to Greek folklore, where inherited supernatural beliefs became entangled with Christian religious life.
Still, imagine being a villager on a small Greek island several centuries ago, hearing that a recently deceased neighbor had been spotted walking along a familiar road after sunset. Then imagine learning that the grave had been opened and the body had failed to decay as expected. In a world where death and the unseen realm were understood as intimately connected, it is not difficult to understand how an entire community might become terrified. And suddenly, Dracula seems almost civilized by comparison.
Medieval Christian Zombies: The Walking Dead Were Already Here
If the Greek vrykolakas sounds more like a zombie than a vampire, there is a good reason for that. Our modern monster categories are tidier than the older traditions from which they developed, and medieval Europeans had numerous stories about dead bodies that refused to remain in their graves. Historians generally call these creatures revenants, from a French word meaning “returning,” and their appearances were recorded by Christian writers long before anyone imagined a Hollywood zombie apocalypse.
One of the most interesting sources is William of Newburgh, a twelfth-century English priest and historian who belonged to an Augustinian religious community in Yorkshire. He wrote his History of English Affairs near the end of the twelfth century. William was not compiling a book of Halloween stories, but attempting to write a serious account of events in England and the surrounding regions. Nevertheless, he included four accounts of troublesome corpses that supposedly returned from their graves and caused considerable distress among the living.
In one account, associated with Berwick-upon-Tweed, a deceased man was said to emerge from his grave at night and wander through the town, terrifying its inhabitants. The townspeople eventually opened the grave, dismembered the corpse, and burned it, believing this would end the disturbances. Another account, involving a deceased cleric buried at Melrose Abbey, described his nocturnal wanderings, frightening people until his body was dealt with. Other stories involved dead men whose return was connected with disease, terror, or the moral failures of their former lives.
These medieval walking dead were certainly not mindless creatures hunting for brains. They often retained a connection to their former identities, their sins, their communities, and the places where they had lived. Their return could be interpreted as punishment, a manifestation of unresolved wrongdoing, or a supernatural disruption of the proper order between the living and the dead. They were frightening partly because they were familiar people behaving in profoundly unfamiliar ways.
Our modern zombie, of course, has a different and more complicated history. The word itself is associated with Caribbean traditions, particularly Haitian religious and cultural beliefs that developed through the experiences of enslaved Africans and their descendants. Haitian accounts of the zonbi often concern a person deprived of freedom, will, or ordinary agency through supernatural means, rather than a ravenous corpse seeking human flesh. The familiar, contagious, flesh-eating zombie of modern horror owes much to twentieth-century cinema, especially George Romero's 1968 film Night of the Living Dead.
Medieval Christian revenants and Haitian zombies therefore have distinct histories, even though both involve disturbing violations of the boundary between life and death. Their similarities reveal an enduring human fear that death might fail to accomplish what we expect.
Christianity itself contains accounts of the dead returning to life, but here a theological distinction is important. When Jesus raises Lazarus in John 11, the event is presented as a Divine restoration of life, not as the emergence of a monstrous corpse. Matthew 27:52–53 also contains the extraordinary report that tombs were opened and many bodies of deceased holy people were raised, appearing to others after Jesus' resurrection. The passage is brief and has been interpreted in various ways, but the scriptures clearly present the event as connected to Divine power rather than as a frightening outbreak of the undead.
And Christianity's ultimate hope IS the resurrection of the body after all, understood as a transformation and restoration of human life through the Creator. That is a very different proposition from the restless, corrupted, or spiritually troubled corpses of medieval folklore. Still, it is quite ironic that some medieval Christians were telling stories about the walking dead centuries before Hollywood discovered how profitable they could be.
The Islamic Ghoul: Something Hungry in the Desert
Now, if I were designing another Halloween hayride, I think the next creature would make an excellent starting point. Imagine traveling alone across a vast desert after sunset, with no moon to guide you and no familiar landmarks in sight. Somewhere in the distance, you notice a fire, or perhaps a solitary figure who appears to be a way to safety. You follow, grateful for the prospect, only to discover that your helpful stranger is something not human.
This is the world of the Arabian ghul, the creature from which we get our English word ghoul. Long before the rise of Islam in the seventh century, Arabian folklore included dangerous supernatural beings associated with deserts, wilderness, and lonely places. The ghul was frequently described as a deceptive, shape-shifting creature that lured travelers away from safety, sometimes to devour them. In later descriptions, these beings might appear as monstrous humanoids with disturbing physical features, although their ability to assume different appearances was often their most dangerous characteristic.
Our modern ghoul, particularly in horror films and fantasy literature, is usually associated with graveyards, corpses, and the consumption of human flesh. That image has roots in Arabic storytelling, but it represents only part of a much broader tradition. The older desert ghoul was often a predator of the living, using deception rather than simply waiting for someone to die. Stories of flesh-eating and graveyard-dwelling ghouls became familiar to European readers through Arabic literary traditions, including tales associated with The Thousand and One Nights, a collection that developed over many centuries.
The ghoul's relationship with Islam is particularly interesting because the religion emerged in a culture where such creatures were already familiar. As we explored in an earlier article on cryptids, the Qur'an recognizes jinn as an entire category of intelligent supernatural beings, created from fire and capable of choosing between good and evil. Ghouls, on the other hand, originated in Arabian folklore as a particular kind of dangerous, shape-shifting monster that preyed upon travelers. Later Islamic traditions sometimes classified ghouls as a particularly dangerous kind of jinn, although jinn as a whole were understood to encompass many beings unrelated to ghouls. Unlike jinn, whose existence is explicitly affirmed in the Qur'an, ghouls are not mentioned there, and a saying attributed to Muhammad in Sahih Muslim appears to deny their existence. Muslim scholars subsequently debated whether this rejected ghouls altogether or merely the frightening powers attributed to them in popular folklore.
Despite these theological disagreements, ghoul stories continued to circulate throughout the Islamic world. They appeared in poetry, folklore, travel narratives, and accounts of the extraordinary. Later writers even offered elaborate explanations for their origins. In some medieval accounts, ghouls were imagined as demonic beings that had been struck by heavenly fire and transformed into monstrous creatures condemned to wander the earth. That particular explanation belongs to later legends rather than the Qur'an itself, but it demonstrates how people attempted to reconcile inherited monster stories with a religious understanding of the unseen world. Rather than abandoning every older supernatural belief, communities sometimes reinterpreted familiar creatures within the theological categories available to them.
There is a resemblance here to some Jewish and Christian traditions concerning demons and fallen angels, particularly the idea that unseen beings might deceive or harm human beings. But that resemblance does not establish that Islamic ghouls and Christian demons are the same creatures, or that one tradition borrowed its supernatural beliefs from another.
I think the ghoul's most frightening characteristic is its ability to appear helpful while deliberately leading someone toward destruction. And if I had heard those stories while traveling through an ancient Arabian desert, I would have been considerably less inclined to investigate mysterious lights after dark.
Werewolves, Witches, and the Bible's Other Uncomfortable Creatures
Of course, no respectable Halloween monster collection would be complete without a werewolf or a witch, and both have interesting connections with the religious world of antiquity. Werewolf stories existed in the ancient Mediterranean long before medieval Christian Europe developed its own elaborate traditions. The Greek historian Herodotus, writing in the fifth century BCE, reported a story about a people called the Neuri, who were said to transform into wolves for several days each year.
Greek mythology also tells the story of Lycaon, a king transformed into a wolf after offending Zeus. The story survives in different versions, including the account in Ovid's Metamorphoses, written around the beginning of the Christian era. In that tradition, transformation into an animal could be about punishment, moral corruption, or the dangerous crossing of boundaries between human and animal existence.
Interestingly, the Bible contains a somewhat related story involving King Nebuchadnezzar in Daniel 4. According to that story, the Babylonian ruler is humbled by the Creator and driven from ordinary human society, living outdoors, eating grass like cattle, and experiencing a profound loss of his former dignity. His hair grows long, and his nails become like those of birds, although the passage does not actually say that he physically transforms into an animal. Modern discussions sometimes describe Nebuchadnezzar as a biblical werewolf or an example of ancient lycanthropy, but the text does not say that specifically. His experience resembles certain themes found in animal-transformation stories, particularly the loss of ordinary human identity, but Daniel presents it as an extraordinary act of Divine judgment followed by restoration.
Later Christian writers also discussed alleged transformations into animals, often treating them with considerable skepticism. Augustine, writing in the early fifth century, considered stories of people appearing to become animals in The City of God, Book XVIII, Chapter 18. He allowed that demonic deception might produce extraordinary appearances or experiences, but he rejected the idea that demons could change the true nature of a human being into that of an animal.
Witches present an even more complicated history, partly because the term witch encompasses several distinct categories of people and practices that were not understood in the same way across cultures or centuries. The Hebrew Bible repeatedly condemns certain forms of sorcery, divination, and attempts to consult the dead, but the English word witch can obscure distinctions among the different Hebrew terms involved. Some of the biblical prohibitions concern ritual practices, others are about seeking forbidden knowledge, and still others reflect ancient Israel's religious boundaries with surrounding cultures.
One of the strangest biblical accounts appears in 1 Samuel 28, where King Saul, desperate for guidance before a battle, visits a woman at Endor, known for communicating with the dead. Saul had previously expelled such practitioners from the land, yet now seeks one out when he cannot obtain the guidance he desires through accepted religious means. The woman apparently succeeds in summoning an apparition identified in the narrative as the deceased prophet Samuel, who delivers a devastating message concerning Saul's future. The account is unusual because the woman herself appears startled by what she sees, and the text does not explain the mechanism behind the apparition. Was Samuel genuinely permitted to appear through an extraordinary act of the Creator, or was the experience something else? Christian interpreters have debated that question for centuries, and the biblical passage does not settle the theological difficulties. What it does clearly establish is that the ancient Israelites knew of practices intended to communicate with the dead, that such practices were religiously forbidden, and that the Bible nevertheless included a story in which just such a supernatural encounter occurred.
Later European witchcraft beliefs developed through a very different combination of Christian theology, inherited folk practices, social anxieties, accusations of harmful magic, and fears about demonic activity. The familiar Halloween witch with a pointed hat, broomstick, and bubbling cauldron emerged through a long process of artistic and cultural development. She should not be confused with a single, clearly defined category of ancient religious practitioner. And, the European witch trials remind us that supernatural fears were not always harmless entertainment. Accusations of witchcraft could destroy reputations, divide communities, and lead to imprisonment, torture, or execution. Catholic and Protestant societies both participated in witch persecutions, although the timing, intensity, and legal circumstances varied considerably.
Why Did Our Religious Ancestors Believe in So Many Monsters?
After wandering through Greek cemeteries, Arabian deserts, and medieval Christian chronicles, I began wondering about something more than the individual creatures themselves. Why did so many religious cultures develop elaborate stories about beings that inhabited the uncertain territory between the ordinary world and the unseen one?
One explanation is that people were trying to understand frightening experiences with the knowledge available to them. An unexpectedly preserved corpse, an unexplained illness, a disturbing dream, or a person experiencing unusual behavior might be interpreted through the religious and cultural assumptions of the surrounding community. Modern medicine, psychology, archaeology, and forensic science can explain many phenomena that earlier generations understood very differently. But I think there is more to the historical story than simply concluding that ancient people were scared because they lacked scientific knowledge.
Their religious understanding of reality was also quite different from that of many modern Western Christians. For ancient Jews, Christians, and Muslims, the unseen world was not an abstract theological category, safely removed from ordinary experience. Their sacred texts described angels appearing to human beings, spirits influencing events, dreams conveying warnings, and encounters with powers that could not be explained through ordinary physical causes. The Bible itself contains enough supernatural material to make a modern horror writer feel quite at home. We have the mysterious beings of Genesis 6, the giant warrior Goliath, the strange vision of living creatures in Ezekiel, the spirit summoned at Endor, and the terrifying imagery of Revelation. There are accounts of demons, angelic encounters, visions, miraculous healings, and even the raising of the dead.
Of course, Christianity does not endorse every supernatural story that developed within its societies. Yet historic Christianity has also never regarded the supernatural as merely a collection of symbolic stories. Catholic and Eastern Orthodox traditions have consistently affirmed the very real existence of angels and demons, the possibility of Divine miracles, the reality of spiritual struggle, and the ultimate resurrection of the dead. These beliefs are core parts of their theological inheritance.
Discernment has also been an important part of the Christian response to extraordinary claims. The New Testament warns believers against accepting every spirit or supernatural message without examination, and later Christian writers frequently cautioned against deception, superstition, and the pursuit of unusual experiences for their own sake. The Catholic Catechism explicitly rejects attempts to conjure the dead or manipulate supernatural powers, while Orthodox spiritual writers have likewise warned against becoming fascinated with extraordinary manifestations at the expense of spiritual maturity.
So, I think our ancestors' monster stories tell us something about the way they understood their world, including the fears they carried into their religious lives. Some of those stories eventually became familiar Halloween entertainment, while others influenced religious customs and even the treatment of people believed to have encountered supernatural forces. Their histories are worth investigating, regardless of whether we believe the creatures themselves ever existed.
A Little Halloween Magic, and a Little Mystery
I suppose one reason I have never outgrown Halloween is that I enjoy the opportunity to indulge my imagination without feeling obligated to explain everything. There is something wonderfully liberating about a moonlit hayride, a well-timed scream from the woods, or a ghostly figure appearing just beyond the reach of the wagon lights. We all know the person in the costume is probably somebody's uncle who has been waiting behind a tree for twenty minutes, but for a brief moment, we allow ourselves to believe otherwise.
Our ancestors approached many of these stories with considerably greater seriousness, and I suspect that distinction deserves respect. Their fears were likely genuine, their religious explanations were likely deeply held, and the consequences of those beliefs may have extended far beyond a pleasant evening of entertainment. At the same time, their stories preserve something that I think modern Christianity, particularly in some of its Protestant and Evangelical expressions, has occasionally lost.
The Christianity I encountered growing up often seemed more sanitized than the religious world described in the Bible or preserved in ancient Christian history. We learned about angels and demons, mostly in passing as we reenacted the Christmas story or heard about sin, but the stranger implications of those beliefs were seldom explored. The complicated relationship between Christian teaching, inherited folklore, mystical experiences, and the broader supernatural imagination was generally left outside the Sunday school classroom.
Perhaps that is one reason I keep returning to these subjects in The Sacred and Strange. I want to understand what our ancestors, especially the earliest followers of Jesus Christ, believed, how those beliefs developed, and what they might tell us about their relationship with the Creator and the unseen world. And I am perfectly comfortable admitting that some questions remain unanswered, even after we have examined the historical evidence and separated it from later embellishments.
Do vampires roam Greek islands, do ghouls haunt lonely deserts, or do restless spirits occasionally interfere with the living? I do not know. Human beings have spent thousands of years wrestling with questions about death, consciousness, spiritual beings, and the possibility that ordinary physical experience does not reveal everything about reality. For now, I am perfectly content to leave most of those monsters where they belong, safely among the costumes, campfire stories, and Halloween decorations. I have no desire to encounter a vrykolakas on a Greek island or discover whether an Arabian ghoul really can imitate a helpful traveler. But I will continue to enjoy investigating, albeit at a distance, the strange religious histories that gave these creatures their enduring appeal.
And to all my wonderful friends and family who spent so many October evenings hiding in the Missouri woods, startling innocent people as they passed by in hay wagons, I hope you know how much those memories still mean to me. We may have packed away the costumes, retired the scripts, and extinguished the last of the pyrotechnics, but I suspect some of our old haunts are still remembered by the people who experienced them. At least, I hope they are.
Happy Halloween, everyone, and may all your encounters with the supernatural be considerably less terrifying than those of our ancestors!
Grace and light to you all.