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posted by chromas on Sunday October 14 2018, @07:41AM   Printer-friendly
from the 2spooky4me dept.

Fifth-Century Child's Skeleton Shows Evidence of "Vampire Burial" :

The "Vampire of Lugnano" had a rock in its mouth to keep it from rising from grave.

Archaeologists have discovered the skeleton of a 10-year-old child at an ancient Roman site in Italy with a rock carefully placed in its mouth. This suggests those who buried the child—who probably died of malaria during a deadly fifth century outbreak—feared it might rise from the dead and spread the disease to those who survived. Locals are calling it the "Vampire of Lugnano."

"This is a very unusual mortuary treatment that you see in various forms in different cultures, especially in the Roman world," says Jordan Wilson, a graduate student in bio-archaeology at the University of Arizona who studied the remains. He added that this could "indicate a fear that this person might come back from the dead and try to spread disease to the living."

Pretty much every culture on Earth has some version of a vampire (or proto-vampire) myth. Chinese folklore has the k'uei, which are reanimated corpses that rise from the grave to prey on the living; one type has sharp fangs, the better to bite into the neck of said prey. Russian, Albanian, Indian, and Greek folklore have similar undead monsters. Russian villagers in the Middle Ages often drove stakes into the bodies of suspected vampires upon burial to keep them from rising again.

The most-likely explanation is that the locals did this to ensure the dead child stayed that way. Prior excavations amidst the human remains in the Cemetery of the Babies unearthed various items commonly associated with magic at the time: raven talons, toad bones, and bronze cauldrons filled with ash. The oldest remains found previously were those of a three-year-old girl whose hands and feet were weighed down with stones.

Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn and cauldron bubble...


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  • (Score: 1) by bussdriver on Sunday October 14 2018, @06:43PM (1 child)

    by bussdriver (6876) Subscriber Badge on Sunday October 14 2018, @06:43PM (#748679)

    Dead bodies do stuff as they decompose. Sometimes freaky stuff. Wiggling from living things that eat the dead is one of them.
    They used to think bugs sprang out of nowhere because we can't see the eggs without technology
    Then you have really sick people who seem dead or near dead who end up living. It's not hard to see the confusion and superstitions.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 14 2018, @09:03PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 14 2018, @09:03PM (#748714)

    More likely it's appearance of apparent continued "living" that freaked people out in the past. Specifically, retraction and dessication of skin leads to fingernails and hair looking "longer" as if they grew after death. Teeth can appear to grow due to retraction around the mouth. Blood can sometimes be ejected from the mouth as gases that built up escape through the mouth. The pushing out of blood by internal gases can also cause a ruddy complexion, particularly noticeable on someone who was pale due to illness before death. Staking a corpse through the heart could lead to sudden expelling of gases that were built up, making it seem like a corpse was losing its "last breath." Etc.

    Most of these phenomena were specifically noted in historical accounts of corpses exhumed and supposed to be vampires. We know exactly what they noticed and most of them are common phenomena that happen to corpses.

    Yes, there may be a few cases of premature burial that also fed into folklore, but most of it was probably just misunderstandings about decomposition.

    Later on, the romanticized fiction added various elements to vampire lore that are disconnected from the folk accounts and are more weird and not likely to have been derived from legitimate accounts of corpses (and they're not present in actual historical accounts from earlier periods).