Zombies have dominated the fields of horror literature and film ever since they staggered their way onto the pop culture scene in George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968). In the last 50 years alone, zombies have undergone many significant iterational changes—they shuffle and then they run, they’re magical then viral, and they’re mindless then intelligent—but the zombies we have come to know and love are an amalgamation of thousands of years of global folklore. In Arabian mythology, lore surrounding the ghoul has been pieced together over time and from many different controversial and convoluted points of origin. The ghoul is a demonic monster as old as the Ancient Mesopotamian cultures that it haunted, and one that persisted through the tumultuous cultural history of the Middle East up through the present day. This essay examines the extensive lore of the ghoul in early works of literature and folklore in anthology from Bedouin, Akkadian, and other early Mesopotamian cultures. Works of collective folklore such as al-Jahiz’s Kitab al-Hayawan, warning against straying from the path or going alone at night lest the flesh-eating “ghuls” take them; Mahammad’s Hadith, which makes reference to demonic beings who were rejected from heaven and doomed to roam the Earth as ghouls; and the controversial edits of One Thousand and One Nights, which have numerous tales of demons and creatures that feast upon wayward travelers and the recently deceased, all build upon the early concepts of the ghoul at length. Through these texts and their historical contexts, one can see the ways in which the ghoul evolved from these warning stories against desert-dwelling ambush predators to full-fledged supernatural, flesh-eating creatures that have managed to distinctly influence the evolution of zombie lore in modern pop culture and embody our morbid obsession with fear and death.