Archaeologists find suspected vampire in Italy

An archaeological excavation of mass graves of plague victims on the island of Lazzaretto Nuovo near Venice, Italy found the first example ever discovered of a suspected vampire.

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The skull, buried in 1576, was found along with part of the body in March 2009 and was unusual as the jaw was forced permanently open by a brick, known to be a medieval exorcism technique to prevent ‘vampires’ returning from the dead.

Matteo Borrini, a forensic archaeologist at the university of Florence, has been leading a team digging on the island since 2006 and describes the find among the mass graves there as unexpected and lucky.

Vampire legends in Europe date back to at least the 9th century and were probably brought by merchants from the Far East along the trade roots to Eastern Europe.  The myths were made more popular from the 15th century by the most famous suspected vampire of them all, Vlad Tepes Dracula.  Dracula earned the name Tepes, which means impaler, because of the methods of torture and execution he used and rumours of him drinking the blood of his victims led many to believe him to be a vampire.

A living vampire would be relatively easy to spot, so it was believed.  They had an aversion to silver, garlic and holy water and could not enter a house unless invited.  They had enlarged incisors, hairy palms, cast no shadow and had no reflection in the mirror.

The Vampire, by Philip Burne-Jones, 1897 (Source)

It was believed that if you were bitten by a vampire, you were doomed to become one along with heretics, criminals and people who commit suicide. The bat became associated with the vampire from the 15th century when Spanish sailors returning from Latin America brought with them stories of blood sucking bats, leading some to believe the vampire had the super natural ability to shape-shift.

It was also believed they could be spotted some time after burial too due to the decomposition process of a human corpse.  As the stomach decays, it releases a bloodlike ‘purge fluid’ which sometimes can exit through the nose and mouth.  On seeing this, some mistook it as evidence of the presence of the un-dead and thought the blood had come from a bite victim.  To further add to the suspicion, the fluid often moistened the burial shroud near the mouth causing it to sag into the jaw and become torn by the teeth.

According to Borrini, these things would normally not be seen very often but as tombs were being reopened much more as a result of the unusually high death rates caused by the plague, gravediggers where seeing bodies with what they saw as evidence for vampire activity more and more.

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Gravediggers are thought to have acted on their suspicions when seeing a suspected Vampire by wedging a brick into the mouth of the corpse. If left unchecked, it was believed vampires would grow strong enough to rise to the surface by feeding on other bodies buried with them, then they would go on to attack the living, spreading the plague and creating new vampires in the process.