The Real History Behind The Librarians: Next Chapter

The Real History and Exorcism Lore Behind ‘The Librarians: The Next Chapter’

Librarians fans, folklore nerds, this one’s for you. TNT’s fantasy-adventure spinoff borrows way more from real history and Balkan mythology than you’d expect from a show about a sword-cane-wielding time traveler. Let’s separate what’s genuinely rooted in the historical record from what’s pure writers’-room invention.

Who is Vikram, and what’s the Belgrade Annex?

If you’re catching up: Vikram Chamberlain, played by Callum McGowan, was the active Librarian of 1847 who gets released from a timeless imprisonment in 2025 and takes up work running the Belgrade Annex. He’s not subtle about it either — the guy literally carries a sword sheathed inside a cane. Show creator Dean Devlin has described him as sharing some DNA with Noah Wyle’s Flynn Carsen from the original franchise, but with a twist: Vikram calls himself “the Naughty Librarian” because, unlike his predecessors, he actually uses magic instead of just studying it.

Backstory-wise, according to the show’s own wiki: Vikram was born in India, trained by fakirs to withstand pain, educated at Oxford and the Sorbonne, and recruited to the Library in 1832 to work out of the Serbian Annex. He fell for a noblewoman named Anya, tangled with a cult leader named General Bogdan Gregor, and got trapped in a time bubble in 1847 — until modern Librarian Jacob Stone (Noah Wyle’s old character) accidentally springs him loose 178 years later.

Here’s the thing worth flagging right away: there was no real secret Library, no real Vikram Chamberlain, and no real General Bogdan Gregor. This is fiction, full stop. But the world the writers dropped him into? That part borrows heavily from things that actually happened.

Was 1847 Serbia really a hotbed for secret societies and magic?

Not magic, no. But 1847 wasn’t a random year to pick. Serbia at that point was an autonomous principality still technically under Ottoman suzerainty, having wrestled real self-governance away only a couple decades earlier. It was a country actively rebuilding its identity, its capital, its institutions — exactly the kind of unstable, transitional setting fiction writers love to drop secret organizations into. Real 19th-century Europe was thick with actual secret societies (Freemasons, Carbonari, various occult revival groups), so a hidden magical bureaucracy operating quietly out of Belgrade isn’t historically implausible as a premise — it’s just entirely made up in the specifics.

The Belgrade Annex: castle, museum, or complete invention?

In the show, Vikram returns to his old castle in Belgrade only to discover it’s been turned into a museum. That detail is a nice, grounded touch. Belgrade’s most famous fortress, Kalemegdan, really did undergo exactly that kind of transformation — from a working military stronghold across Roman, Byzantine, Ottoman, and Habsburg control into a public park and museum complex today. The show doesn’t use the real Kalemegdan by name (Vikram’s castle is fictional), but the “old fortress becomes tourist attraction” arc mirrors what actually happened to Belgrade’s real historic strongholds. Points for atmosphere, even if the specific castle is invented.

Fact-checking the drekavac

Now for the fun part. One of Season 1’s most talked-about episodes, And the Deadly Drekavac, pits the team against a screaming creature pulled straight from Balkan folklore — and this is where the show gets surprisingly accurate.

In real South Slavic mythology, the drekavac — whose name comes from the verb “to screech” — is a mythical creature described in various ways, sometimes as an undead man who leaves his grave at night, sometimes as an unbaptized child’s restless spirit. One detailed folklore write-up puts it plainly: the creature’s scream functions as an omen, warning of a coming death when it takes child form, or of disease among livestock when it appears as an animal.

Descriptions of what it actually looks like vary wildly by region, which honestly gives the showrunners a lot of creative freedom without technically getting it “wrong.” One folklore encyclopedia notes it’s sometimes described as having the head and body of a dog with muscular, kangaroo-like hind legs. There have even been modern “sightings” — in 1992, villagers near Krvavica found a strange carcass with a dog’s body and a snake-like head that locals initially called a drekavac before it was identified as a decomposed fox. Kind of makes you wonder how many “monster sightings” are just wildlife having a very bad decomposition day, doesn’t it?

Bottom line: the drekavac is 100% real folklore (not a real creature, obviously, but a genuinely documented piece of Balkan oral tradition), and the show didn’t just make up a spooky name for shock value. That’s a rare win for monster-of-the-week accuracy.

Exorcism lore: how close does the show get to the real rite?

The keyword “exorcism lore” points at something bigger than one episode — it’s the whole aesthetic the show borrows from: possession, demons, banishment rituals. So how does Hollywood’s version stack up against the real thing?

The actual Catholic Rite of Exorcism has a documented paper trail. Pope Paul V authorized the first official edition of the Rituale Romanum in 1614. That text stood largely untouched for centuries — it wasn’t meaningfully revised until 1952, then again after the Second Vatican Council, before being formally reissued in 1999. Real exorcisms, unlike the movie version, involve strict bureaucracy: the rite can only be performed by a priest specifically authorized by a bishop, and it’s only pursued after careful investigation. No candles-and-chanting free-for-all — there’s paperwork involved. Genuinely.

Shows like this one tend to lean on the aesthetics of exorcism (Latin phrases, holy water, crucifixes) without the procedural reality behind it — the actual rite is closer to a formal liturgical process than a dramatic showdown. That’s not a knock on the writers; it’s just how TV works. Drama needs a climax, not a diocesan review board.

The “dancing sickness” episode vs the real Dancing Plague of 1518

Season 1 features an episode where the team investigates a mysterious “dancing sickness” tied to a ballet company. If that rang a bell, good instinct — it’s clearly riffing on one of history’s strangest, best-documented medical mysteries: the Strasbourg Dancing Plague.

In July 1518, a woman named Frau Troffea stepped into a Strasbourg street and began dancing uncontrollably, unable to stop until she collapsed — and within a week, more than 30 other people were doing the same thing. This wasn’t a one-off. It was the most fatal and best-documented of more than ten similar outbreaks that had struck towns along the Rhine and Moselle rivers since 1374. City officials, bafflingly, initially tried treating it like a medical condition rather than a curse: physicians of the time diagnosed it as a natural disease caused by “overheated blood” and actually hired musicians to help the afflicted dance it out. That did not work, for the record. People died of exhaustion, heart attack, and stroke.

Historians today lean toward mass psychogenic illness — a form of stress-induced group behavior tied to famine, disease, and religious anxiety gripping the region at the time. No magic involved, just a population under so much collective strain that their bodies apparently found the weirdest possible outlet. Real history really can out-weird fiction sometimes.

John Dee’s Crystal: this one’s actually sitting in a museum right now

Here’s a target keyword you might not expect to check out: an episode centers on someone using “Dr. John Dee’s Crystal” to manipulate memories and glimpse the future. And unlike Vikram or the Belgrade Annex, John Dee was a completely real historical figure — and his scrying tools genuinely exist today.

John Dee (1527–1608/9) was an Elizabethan mathematician, astrologer, and self-described magician who used a “shew-stone” — a polished obsidian mirror — as a tool for occult research. The mirror wasn’t European in origin, either: it was made of Aztec obsidian, brought to Europe following Cortés’s conquest of Mexico between 1527 and 1530. For roughly a decade, Dee and his scryer Edward Kelley claimed to receive messages through the mirror, which Dee believed came from angels while Kelley suspected they were demons.

The object’s current home might surprise you: it’s not locked in a vault somewhere mysterious. The mirror sits on public display in the British Museum’s Enlightenment Gallery, acquired in 1966 after passing through the collection of antiquarian Horace Walpole. Modern science has even weighed in — geochemical analysis published in the journal Antiquity traced the obsidian’s exact origin to quarries near Pachuca, Mexico. So the show’s “magic crystal” premise isn’t invented from nothing. It’s inspired by a genuinely documented object you could go look at in London this weekend.

So, is the show historically accurate?

Depends what you’re measuring. If you want a documentary, look elsewhere — General Bogdan Gregor, the entire Library organization, and Vikram himself are pure fiction. But the show’s texture draws from real, verifiable sources way more often than casual viewers probably assume:

• The drekavac — genuine, well-documented South Slavic folklore, not an invented monster.
• The exorcism aesthetic — loosely modeled on a real, centuries-old Catholic rite with actual procedural rules.
• The dancing sickness — a clear echo of the real 1518 Strasbourg outbreak, one of history’s stranger unsolved mysteries.
• John Dee’s Crystal — based on a real 16th-century artifact currently on display in the British Museum.
• The Belgrade setting — leans on Serbia’s real 19th-century transitional history, even if specific characters are made up.

That’s a pretty solid hit rate for a network fantasy show mostly built to be a Monday-night comfort watch. The writers clearly did their homework, then filed off just enough detail to fit a 42-minute episode.

Quick FAQ

What’s the real history behind the “dancing sickness” episode? It’s based on the Dancing Plague of 1518 in Strasbourg, a documented case of mass compulsive dancing that killed dozens through exhaustion.

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So next time you’re watching Vikram swing that sword-cane around Belgrade, know this: half the “magic” on screen started life as something a historian could actually footnote. Not bad for a show about a naughty 19th-century Librarian.