Dead Persons in Hungary, by AA Calmet

Are vampires real? The testimony of early 18th-century witnesses suggests a definitive answer.

Read by David Tennant.

Antoine Augustin Calmet published an apparently serious anthropological history of the vampire throughout Europe in the early 19th century called "The Phantom World". All the people he spoke to were adamant about what they had witnessed. His account therefore appears all the more disturbing and became the basis for the flights of vampiric fancy that took off in the Victorian age.

Producer: Clive Brill

A Pacificus production for BBC Radio 4 first broadcast in 2010.