E-mail updates
Follow on Twitter
Subscribe to RSS
AP
A piece of iron lies next to a skeleton dating back to the Middle Ages at an archaeological dig in the Black Sea town of Sozopol. Bulgarian archaeologists say they have found skeletons that were pinned down through their chests with iron rods - a practice believed to stop the dead from rising as vampires.
Bulgarian archaeologists are showing off two centuries-old skeletons that they say were pinned down through their chests with iron rods to keep them from turning into vampires — a trend that was all the rage in medieval Europe.
The "vampire" skeletons were excavated recently near the Black Sea town of Sozopol, according to reports from The Associated Press and AFP. Bozhidar Dimitrov, head of Bulgaria's National History Museum, was quoted as saying that corpses were regularly treated this way in some parts of the country until the beginning of the 20th century.
About 100 similar burials have been found in Bulgaria over the years. "I do not know why an ordinary discovery like that became so popular," AP quoted Dimitrov as saying on Tuesday. "Perhaps because of the mysteriousness of the word 'vampire.'"
Bulgarian archaeologist Petar Balabanov has found a number of nailed-down skeletons near the eastern town of Debelt, at gravesites dating as far back as the 1st century. According to custom, the bodies had to be pinned down just in case they tried to rise from the grave. AFP quoted Balabanov as saying that the rite was practiced in Bulgaria as well as other Balkan countries.
Of course, the world's most famous vampire legend is associated with the 15th-century Balkan strongman known as Dracula, or Vlad the Impaler. That's mainly due to Irish novelist Bram Stoker, who borrowed the Dracula name for his 1897 novel about a blood-sucking bad guy from Transylvania. The idea that vampires drank blood may be of relatively recent vintage, but the idea that the dead had to be stopped from rising again was widespread in medieval times — in part due to the plague.
Several years ago, Italian archaeologists made a splash when they dug into a mass grave for 16th-century plague victims on the Venetian island of Nuovo Lazzaretto and found the remains of a woman who had a brick stuck between her jaws. To explain the brick, they cited some of the anti-vampire strategies practiced at the time.
For example, in one region of Germany, gravediggers would occasionally return to a plague grave and find that the shroud surrounding the corpse had been eaten away, with blood or other fluids coming out of the mouth. The hair and fingernails also appeared to grow longer, even after burial. Today, researchers say such phenomena are due to the natural stages of decomposition — but in the Middle Ages, people feared that these were the signs of vampirism.
The Italian researchers claimed that the brick was jammed in to keep the "Vampire of Venice" from causing trouble. But other archaeologists have disputed that claim. They suggest instead that the brick merely fell into the mouth of the woman's skull. That has sparked a scientific tiff, as LiveScience reported last month.
Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.
Based on Balabanov's excavations, the Bulgarian nailing-down practice goes much farther back than Dracula or the Black Death — maybe like placing coins on the eyes of the deceased, but grislier. What do you think? Is this solid science, or another case of vampire grandstanding? Please feel free to weigh in with your comments below.
More about ghoulish archaeology:
- 'Vampire' victim spurs gruesome debate
- Black magic revealed in ancient tablets
- The science of bloodsuckers
- Gallery: Seven ghoulish discoveries
- Gallery: Myths and realities about vampires
Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.
Leave a Comment:
Your top Canine teeth or top fang teeth , have a natural occurring groove or indentation , in the back near the gum line ....
What does evolution have in store for those top Canine grooves or indentations .... ??
I really don't believe in Vampires though ....
But it does remind me that I need to pick up some more garlic cloves at the vegi store ....
I don't know about vampires but I have a good idea why that woman had a brick stuck in her mouth.
Right! Vampires have bricks stuck in their mouths at burial to prevent them from feeding again. I never heard of vampires being nailed to the earth.
@cheetah:
It is a bit ironic, really . . .
Really!
Being the eternal pedant, here goes:Once upon a time fear of being buried alive was so prevalent that little bells were installed over coffins and strings were attached so that a person possibly prematurely interred could ring the bell and alert others to their plight. Determination of death was sometimes a bit difficult and documentated cases of people declared dead only to regain consciousness are, while not common, not unknown either.
As to vampires, there is such a thing as clinical vampirism, along with clinical lycanthropy. The afflicted individual believes they are inhabited by an animal and assume the characteristics of said animal. There are some creepy tales coming out of the Crimean war, stories of 'dead' soldiers found feasting on the remains of their comrades along with performing 'unnatural acts' on said deceased.
So, in conclusion, I have absolutely no idea what went on in the minds of those who 'pegged' those corpses and agree with the one poster who thought the pin or peg resembled a foot.
What does evolution have in store for those top Canine grooves or indentations .... ??
...uh i dont know, to tear food? Awesome question bigbenalaska
@ImoenOfTelengard
Nailing or pinning a vampire into their coffin(or the ground) was the original use for the 'stake'. With books and movies that morphed into the 'wooden stake' that was to be driven through the heart of the vampire to kill it. But yea, originally it was just to make sure the body couldn't rise again.
The skeleton looks like........like DICK CHENEY !!!
(sorry couldn't resist) :-)
I think it was her husband who put a brick into this woman's jaws...
I would have to believe that the grave diggers didn't fare well after digging up plague victims but then again, as late as the early 1900's, one can find biology books that state some insects, toads and mice simply spontaneously appeared.
The world may have been a bit more fun when there was more mystery.
One thing we've learned through the modern Bush/Cheney era ... the living are much more frightening & dangerous than the dead!
LMAO, Eric! Here's another eerie similarity: neither the vampire nor Cheney has a pulse or a conscience!!!!!
Beheading was as common as a stake through the heart. Mouths shoved full of garlic cloves. So the choice was between a cold steak with garlic or a hot Chop, Nyuk Nyuk Nyuk!
vampires are still with us ... pretending to be bankers and hedge fund managers .
From what I can tell, the stakes are the only sure thing to stop vampires from rising after death. Every single iron stake they found still had a skeleton attached, meaning it is 100% effective. Kudos to you guys back then for thinking outside the box when talking about the inside of the box.
I have read the article read many comments. But there doesn't seem to be anyone talking about the elephant in the room. Maybe I am mistaken but that skeleton looks huge. It appears to be a giant rather than a vampire. Don't you think?
Looks like it worked - that skellie is still lying there
Haha Doug thanks I needed a good laugh. :D
Damn it Doug, you took my joke! ;)
Good one, Doug!
:D
Dang! Now I'll have to throw out my wooden stakes and replace them with iron. Good thing I still have ample supplies of garlic, crucifixes and white roses...
It would have been much harder to explain a grave with just an iron spike don't you think?
If you found a skeleton of a Vampire wouldn't that be un-Hollywood, Vampires burn to ashes in the daylight and their bodies never decay even with a stake through their heart and the stake is never made of iron.
The bones better not be exposed to sunlight. Ha Ha!
The sunlight thing is a myth.
The rest of the legend is real.
Hmmm, vampires are real? :-0
How else would you explain Dick Cheney?
Nancy Pelosi, 600 hundreds years and counting. Where's that brick?
Ann Coulter, where's that iron stake? A brick would never stop that btch from biting.
Looks like a skeleton with a piece of medieval dog crap lying beside it ..
I thought it looked like a petrified foot
Doug- That's what I thought at first too.
Everyone knows that medieval dog crap turned into petrified foot before turning into rotted iron back in those days. lol
The reason why Bulgaria had such a vampire problem for so long is because they were using iron stakes.
The rest of Europe had the common sense to use wood.
LOL, just what I was thinking. Silly Bulgarians!
I dunno...looks like the iron stakes held them down better. The wooden ones would just rot after awhile. I guess it was a trial and error thing.
And stupidity grows with more nonsense.
its called humor, try it out sometime
No I'm talking about the fact that the ones who found the skeleton will most likely restart the paranoia that vampires exist.
Historical vampires usually have stones or bricks lodged in their mouths upon death. In other words, these corpses were probably considered to be more like "zombies" rather than vampires.
I'm sorry but I thought this article was badass. Thats how I want to be burried! Gotta love the supersticious!
Naah... they just talked too frickin much. I've been using the stone or brick in the mouth thing on my wife for years.
These people were obsessed with making sure the vampires would remain in their graves. In this case, the brick was probably placed in her mouth for good measure. I think a lot of it had to do with the women being afraid and jealous of the so-called vampires. The men probaly felt guilty as hell because they had "impure thoughts." Then the superstition took off from there. Look what it did for the women labeled as witches back in the day. Repressed sexual thoughts and a strict religion can drive a whole town or country crazy. It's called mass hysteria.
It's disturbing that folklore, superstitions, myths, etc. have gone on for thousand of yrs. there were real people like Vlad the Impaler (major psycho) but we still have psychos running around today convinced that they're vampires or vampire hunters. It's so sexy to be a vampire these days. People need to think about how sexy and romantic it was for people like this woman who was tortured and murdered. Probably not so much. Damn I hate ignorant superstitions but I don't know of any that aren't ignorant.
Anyway...
Great article as always, Alan.
Nice post Darrah ....
Your right about the vampire craze ....
Many do try to make them seem attractive and sexy now ....
But to me , vampires are just a pain in the neck ....
naaaah the brick treatment was men getting a chance to do to their wives in death what they never got to do while she was alive
Vlad Tepes was not a "major psyco", he just had a passionate dislike of the Turks at the time. The 'Impaler' aspect has been blown out of proportion over the years, but yes he did have the habit of leaving the impaled bodies of defeated armies on spears as a not so subtle warning to anyone else who decided to invade his kingdom. It is also rumored that one time a visiting Turkish dignitary refused to remove his turban in Vlad's presence, so Vlad had his servants nail the turban to the dignitary's head as a reminder that he was the King and when he tells you to remove your hat, you better do it.
the sexy male vampire is total crap, think about it, no liquid blood, no heartbeat, no bloodflow ergo no erection so male vampires are pretty much sexless
LOL
You wish!
Well I Can tell you that vampires really exist now Days. I've got a ex-wife who sucked the life out of me!!!!
I think there's a difference between leeches and vampires though.
At least you had a wife who sucked something.
uuuh, this is Jeb from Florida.... do you guys know how we can pin down our zombies?
Jeb, just tell your dumbass brother George that the zombies have WMD's. He'll send some guys right over.
honey make sure the windows are double locked and a cross and garlic are hanging there. opps don't forget the holy water. ok now we can get some sleep.
Looking at that photograph, it occurs to me that the lede has been buried here. Surely the big news in this story is that "lump of iron" now equals "iron rod" and that the ancients were able to nail a lump of iron into a squishy corpse with nary a point in sight. Or alternatively, that these corpses were so blazing hot that they melted the former iron rods into lumps.
This reminds me of the gyrations I've seen some archaeologists go through -- usually when documentary cameras are trained on them -- to claim that a dug-up structure which appears run-of-the-mill is quite obviously an astronomical observatory.
"See? That window over there totally lines up with the summer solstice and there's this sort of roundish shape scratched on the wall here that must represent the sun. Now give me another grant."
I want to suck your blood!
I, for one, demand to know if Donald "The Birther" Trump's ex-wife Ivanna's middle name just might be 'Biteyourneck' and whether she has any Romanian or Bulgarian blood - innate or transfused - coursing through her veins. Show me the birth certificate!
Salt and burn the bones. It is the only way.
Somebody's been watching "Supernatural".....
A woman's corpse was exhumed while villagers watched; they claimed to have seen her walking about the town after she had died, and thought her to be a vampire. When her coffin was opened, she appeared to be alive, as no decomposition had occurred since her burial a while before. There was still fresh looking blood in her veins and organs. Her heart was removed, burned on a nearby rock, and the ashes were made into a drink that was given to her younger brother, who was ill. People blamed his vampire-sister for his illness. Did this happen in Eastern Europe in the Middle Ages? No, it happened in New England in 1892. Google, "Mercy Brown". A vampire craze swept the U.S. in the 19th century, and some 100 bodies of suspected "living dead" were exhumed because of this.
I recall about 20 years ago in Norwich, CT, a graveyard was discovered next to a quarry when several decaying coffins had been exposed. Inside several of the coffins it was discovered that the heads were resting inside the chests. Historians had determined through records that there had been a "vampire" outbreak in this town. It was thought that after the heart and liver had been removed and burned for the family members to ingest (sort of an inoculation against becoming vampires themselves) the head of the deceased was then cut off and placed inside the chest cavity to prevent the accused vampire from returning. Forensic evaluation of the skeleton determined that the supposed vampires actually had Tuberculosis, and was able to trace the family and origin of the disease back to a town and family in Vermont.
Tuberculosis was often referred to as 'consumption' and when it infected the lungs, in late stage, the infected person often coughed up their own blood and were pale and not very interested in eating food. Lack of knowledge of this disease reinforced superstition and the outbreak of vampires in New England was born.
I think the heads were cut off and put in the chests because the coffins were too short. no?
If they had staked down more of those corpses, we might have been spared an awful lot of atrocious television.
Not to mention the blood-suckers who have run for and been elected to government office.
sorry atrocious television is invulnerable, it will always rise and is unstoppable
They probably were pretty snobby at the time, and didn't want just any old dead person arising during the Rapture. You realize that the 1st Century was after the first millennium, but pretty close, scientific explanations non existent, and jealousy and hatred running rife. There would have been plenty of bogus religious explanations around, for what science can explain today.
So, imagine a scenario where some holier than thou snob, claimed they were the true believer and were going to be raptured after their death, and rise to heaven. What better way to prevent that from happening, or so their enemy might think, than nailing them down. Look at all the creative ways the movie industry depicts zombies and the like, not as compost, but wandering as they would look recently alive, physical bodies with lots of blood.
There is no mention of the rapture in the Bible and the idea of it didn't exist until 1830, so nobody from the 1st Century would have even thought about it. More than likely, given the time period and the region, these people wouldn't have been Christian and would have been Pagans of some sort or another.
There was no mention of the rapture in the Bible and the idea of it didn't exist until 1830, so chances are people from the 1st Century were not thinking of it. Considering the region and the time period, they were probably not Christian at all but most likely some form of a Pagan religion.
Iron when buried tends to grow in size from corrosion. The actual iron rod is in the middle of the misshapen lump.
If someone had produced a radiograph showing a spike in there, I'd have no problem with this story as written. As it stands, an iron rod is purely hypothetical, but it's presented nonchalantly as fact here. It might be an ornamental cross in there for all we know, but that wouldn't advance their tenuous connection to the current vapid vampire fad. "We found a cross in a grave!" isn't gonna get them any column-inches.
Vampires are not real.. Cannibals are a bit like vampires LoL
This sounds all Hollywood to me. You will be amazed how many idiots will go to Bulgaria to see this. This must be really a slow news day, so our news people just invent bull crapola for the masses. It is all about bread and circuses. Maybe those idiots going to Bulgaria can stop by Greece and see some real action as Athens goes up in flames due to banking crisis along with Spain and Italy.
The two coins have nothing to do with VAMPIRES,,,jeez please! The two coins were to "pay the Boat Man" as you crossed the river Styx. I grant you all superstitions, but at least get the fables straight. LOL
Now given the recent spate of zombies in the US from bath salts, I'm sure that will spawn some more stories about VOODOO.
i think my boss is a vampire....he only comes out when it's guitting time....
True Blood - New season starts Sunday (HBO)
What's the difference between my ex-boss and a vampire?
One is a blood sucking, life-destroying creature that craves violence and destruction. The other is a mythical creature from Bulgaria.
Ha ha. Chick with a brick in her mouth! Ha ha! No mystery. Broad talked to much! The devil probably put it there to make her shut up!