ROME – An archaeological dig near Venice has unearthed the 16th-century remains of a woman with a brick stuck between her jaws — evidence, experts say, that she was believed to be a vampire.
The unusual burial is thought to be the result of an ancient vampire-slaying ritual. It suggests the legend of the mythical bloodsucking creatures was tied to medieval ignorance. The well-preserved skeleton was found in 2006 on the Lazzaretto Nuovo island, north of the lagoon city, amid other corpses buried in a mass grave during an epidemic of plague that hit Venice in 1576.
“Vampires don’t exist, but studies show people at the time believed they did,” said Matteo Borrini, a forensic archaeologist and anthropologist at Florence University, who studied the case over the last two years.
During epidemics, mass graves were often reopened to bury fresh corpses and diggers would chance upon older bodies that were bloated, with blood seeping out of their mouth and with an inexplicable hole in the shroud used to cover their face.
“These characteristics are all tied to the decomposition of bodies,” Mr Borrini said. “But they saw a fat, dead person, full of blood and with a hole in the shroud, so they would say: ‘This guy is alive, he’s drinking blood and eating his shroud.”’ Modern forensic science shows the bloating is caused by a build-up of gases, while fluid seeping from the mouth is pushed up by decomposing organs, Mr Borrini said. The shroud would have been consumed by bacteria found in the mouth area, he said.
To kill the undead creatures, the stake-in-the-heart method popularised by later literature was not enough: a stone or brick had to be forced into the vampire’s mouth so that it would starve to death, Mr Borrini said.
The discovery shows vampires were originally quite different from the elegant, aristocratic blood-drinker depicted in Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula. “The real vampire of tradition was different,” said Mr Borrini. “It was just a decomposing body.” – (AP)