Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) was written (or possibly edited from H.F.’s papers) before vampires had even reached England, but a hundred years later in ‘The Vampires of London’ the creature had not only become a familiar staple of the popular press but was also being used in figurative ways to rewrite the history of contagion—among other things—in luridly Gothic terms. This is no surprise: from their inception, vampires were both rational and irrational—coexisting in peasant superstition and forensic medical reports, metaphysical theology and Enlightenment philosophy, political satire and supernatural literature. They were intimately associated with disease and the dead, the invisible and the inexplicable, yet also with the tangible and the earthly, as well as with scepticism and doubt. Vampires therefore became a key focus in thinking about—and indeed challenging—conceptions of death in the period. They drew attention to medical, legal, and religious definitions of the living and the lifeless; the treatment of cadavers; the politics and policing of the dead and the enforcement of their corporeal rights and responsibilities; the rituals surrounding funerals (and exhumations) and places of burial; the deterioration and dangers of the post-mortem body; and later the criminality and eroticization of the living corpse. The debates about vampirism were concerned with the nature of the human, the question of life after death, and the reliability of evidence—or rather these debates were effectively contaminated by vampirism in the period. Rather than crystallizing and containing the problems that vampires presented, these disputes instead released them into Romantic literature like a cauldron of bats with an imaginative momentum that remains to this day.