Female "Vampire" Found in Venice Dig | NBC Chicago

Female "Vampire" Found in Venice Dig



    Associated Press
    This previously altered handout and photo shows the 16th-century remains of a woman with a brick stuck between her jaws, as depicted in the computer generated image at left, unearthed in 2006 in an archaeological dig near Venice, northern Italy. Experts say the brick between her jaws is evidence that she was believed to be a vampire.





    Medieval texts show the belief in vampires was fueled by the disturbing appearance of decomposing bodies, Borrini told The Associated Press by telephone.






    That's what is believed to have happened to the woman found on the Lazzaretto island, which was used as a quarantine zone by Venice. Aged around 60, she died of the plague during the epidemic that also claimed the life of the painter Titian.

    Much later, someone jammed the brick into her mouth when the grave was reopened. Borrini said that marks and breaks left by blunt instruments on several among more than 100 skeletons found by the archaeologists show that the grave was reused in a later epidemic.

    Such a reconstruction of events is plausible, as is the link to the superstitions about "shroud-eaters," said Piero Mannucci, the vice president of the Italian Society of Anthropology and Ethnology.

    "Maybe a priest or a gravedigger put the brick in her mouth, which is what was normally done in such cases," Mannucci said.

    The anthropologist, who did not take part in Borrini's research, said that at a time when bacteria were unknown, such superstitions were a way for the terrified population to explain the waves of plague epidemics that killed millions during the Middle Ages. Jews were also often accused of spreading the disease.

    Borrini said the discovery shows that vampires in popular culture were originally quite different from the elegant, aristocratic blood-drinker depicted in Bram Stoker's 1897 novel "Dracula" and in countless Hollywood revisitations.

    "The real vampire of tradition was different," he said. "It was just a decomposing body."

