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John Blair Killing the Dead Vampire epidemics from Mesopotamia to the New World 536pp. Princeton University Press. £30 (US $35). A dead body, as anyone who has sat with one will know, is an unsettling

It sounds like the stuff of conspiracy theories or a disaster movie: a series of volcanic eruptions kicks off a deadly pandemic. But new research suggests that such an event may indeed have happened.

A round 3.30pm on 30 April 1945, Adolf Hitler shot himself in his Berlin bunker. Minutes later, his still warm body was carried outside by loyal staffers and burned in the Reich Chancellery gardens. H

‘Green sickness’, also known as the ‘disease of virgins’ – a diagnosis applied mainly to teenage girls from the 16th to the 19th centuries – is one of the most puzzling conditions in the history of me

Do older people see more ghosts? In the 1985 film version of EM Forster’s A Passage to India, a character refers to the tendency of older people to believe in ghosts, remarking “that it’s difficult, a

One morning, after 65-year-old Chonthirat Sakulku had been bedridden for two years with deteriorating health, her brother found that she had stopped breathing and assumed she was dead. He alerted the