Punishing the Dead

12/22/2024

By M.P. Pellicer | Stranger Than Fiction Stories
In January, 2017 a discovery was made in Northamptonshire from the Romano-Britain period. The corpse was buried face down and his tongue had been cut out and replaced with a flat stone. These are all indicators that this individuals was considered odd or a threat to the community.

Punishment could follow a person into the afterlife by mutilating their corpse or the way they were buried

It is speculated that the man’s tongue was cut out as a punishment for spreading malicious accusations. Or perhaps he was scapegoated for bad weather, as the area where he was buried became a cemetery only when it became too flooded for habitation.

An epidemic could also have been the reason why his corpse was punished, since an understanding of germs and bacteria was not understood when he lived.

Ancient burials across Europe demonstrate the same methods, in which there is a fear of the individuals beyond the time of their death.

In 2012, a discovery was made in Sozopol, Bulgaria of several skeletons with iron rods through their chest. A few years previously other skeletons were found in Czechoslovakia weighed down with stones on their chests. These burials dated back 5,000 years. Other corpses have been found decapitated, with their hearts pierced and buried in bogs or swampy areas.

These persons had been suspected while alive, and when they were buried, measures were taken to make sure they did not become undead menaces. This is contrary to folklore about vampires where a person was disinterred and mutilated, and suspected of being evil after they had died.

A Polish burial placed a sickle across the throat of the deceased to make sure he didn't rise from the dead

Iron Age Celtic burial sites across Britain and Ireland display practices where certain dead were considered dangerous to the living. The parts of the body that were targeted were the heart and the head, where it was believed the soul dwelt.

Sometimes the individual's only "sin" was to die an unnatural, sudden death through murder or accident. The fear was that this person had been cheated of a full life and were likely to rise from their grave.

Desecrating the corpse after burial is thought to also have been a way to punish the individuals, by not allowing their spirit to go on into the afterlife.

In Britain deviant burials date back to the 11th century, and are believed to have persisted into the middle ages, and much less conspicuously into the 20th century.

The worse offenders were denied burial in the churchyard.

Reconstruction of Lilas Adie based on photos taken of her remains in 1904

Farquhar Shaw was buried on the Rothiemurchus estate in Scotland. In 1405, five heavy stones were place on his flat tombstone, and then a metal cage was placed over it to stop anyone from removing them. This was done because Farquhar had "troubled the neighborhood" in life, and there was fear he would continue to be a problem after he was dead.

In 1704, Lilias Adie committed suicide. She had been jailed at Torryburn in Fife, accused of being a witch. Her body was buried in the foreshore between the high and low watermark with a flat stone over it. She was doubly dangerous for being a possible witch, and having done away with herself.

Grave robbers dug her up in 1852, and it was reported her coffin measured 6'6" in length. The skull still had most of its teeth which were described as "white and fresh", and her thighbones were comparable to a man who measured 6 feet in height, which made her quite a tall woman in an age when the average female height was only 5 feet.

In 1875, antiquarian Joseph Neil Paton was displaying the skull in his private museum in Dunfermline. Nine years later Dr. Dow exhibited it to the Fifeshire Medical Association, and it eventually ended up at the Museum of the University of St. Andrews. In 1904, photographs were taken of Adie's remains, which are now held at the National Library of Scotland. The skull disappeared until 1938 when it was displayed at the Empire Exhibition at Bellahouston Park in Glasgow, its last known location.

Even her coffin was used to make souvenirs. A walking stick with a silver band engraved with "Lilias Addie, 1704" was donated to the Pittencrieff House Museum in 1927.

In 1824, a saw-pit near Tintern Abbey was being excavated by laborers. A skeleton was found in an orchard. It had been buried face down. A very old, local woman voiced her suspicion that he was a man believed to have been murdered, but who disappeared from his home about 100 years before. Possibly the person who murdered and buried him, wanted to make sure his victim would not return and seek vengeance from beyond the grave.

An archaeological dig in Suffolk, England yielded up 52 Roman-era cemetery skeletons dating back to the 4th century. Many had been decapitated, their heads placed neatly at their sides or feet for burial, or buried without bodies altogether. Only 17 skeletons had been buried normally.

In 1889, during an Edinburgh murder trial the murdered man's clothes were produced in the court, but his boots were missing. It turned out the local constable had been ordered to bury them on the shore, between the low and high watermark just like Lilias Adie. This was to prevent him from walking among the living, and demonstrates that it wasn't only the murderer who feared him.

In July 1915, a British officer saw two of his soldiers burying a dead German face down. Even in wartime precautions fueled by superstition were taken to make sure the dead did not escape, and seek retribution.

In many detailed stories from the 19th and early 20th century which originated in Russia, Austria, Poland, Romania, Hungary and Czechoslovakia, where those who were already dead were still blamed for severe weather.

In 1891, a Russian woman who had died of alcohol poisoning was disinterred and used as a scapegoat, linking her death by fluid with an associated drought.

In 1900, a summer drought in Czechoslovakia was blamed on the village schoolmaster who had been buried with a feather pillow beneath his head. The solution of course was to open the grave and remove the pillow.

Folklorist Agnes Murgoci wrote how in 1926 in Zarnesti, Transylvania heavy rains were blamed on the vampiric corpse of a recently buried girl.

The following story that occurred in a rural area of Crimea, demonstrates that fear of those who had died, overrode even displeasing God:

When the prolonged drought of summer 1905 was blamed on a supposed wizard, buried that March, the villagers of Svino Krivza led a solemn torchlight procession to his grave one Sunday at midnight. To the dirge-like playing of fiddles and flutes, he was disinterred, so that the village priest could sprinkle him with holy water before reburial. Unfortunately the priest, Father Constantin, objected and rashly upbraided the villagers for their barbarity and superstition. As a result, he was thrown into the grave, with the offending corpse hurled in on top of him. He was hauled out the following day but could not be revived. If not for two especially pious women who had alerted the police, we should perhaps never have known of this case at all.

Cillini site

Cillini were burying grounds for stillborn and unbaptized infants, the mentally disabled, strangers, the shipwrecked, criminals, famine victim and suicides. The sites proliferated in Ireland from the 17th century onward. Location for these unconsecrated cemeteries were usually deserted churches and graveyards, ancient monuments, boundary ditches, crossroads, castles, lakes and sea shores.

The origins of this custom was the communal response to the Catholic Church's teaching on purgatory. A normal Christian burial means the body is oriented west to east, in an extended or lightly supine position, with no grave goods.

In medieval Ireland, deviant burials besides being excluded from consecrated grounds, could include decapitation, isolated burials or burials in unusual places, amputations and stones placed on the body or the grave itself.

Removing the head or another body part was to prevent the person from rising on Judgement Day, therefore not allowing them to be saved.

During the 8th century, placing a rock within the mouth was linked to vampires and zombies.

Deviant burials dating back to 8th century Ireland

In 2008, two 8th century skeletons were unearthed in Kilteashee, Ireland. These burials predated the vampire hysteria that enveloped Europe in the 16th century.

Both were men, one was between 40 and 60 years old, and the other between 20 and 30 years old. They were laid side by side. One was lying looking up with a large, black stone shoved into his mouth, the other had his head turned to the side with an even larger stone wedged in between his teeth to the point his jaws were almost dislocated.

The mouth was seen as where the soul left the body upon death. It was also the way an evil spirit could enter the body to reanimate it.

Were these men dangerous people, or just ordinary persons who died under mysterious circumstances or even murder?

The men were only 2 of the 137 skeletons excavated between 2005 to 2009. It's estimated that about 3,000 skeletons were buried there from 700 to 1400. Originally thought to have been a gravesite dating to the Black Death, the early date of 700 A.D. ended this hypothesis.

The exhumation of Arnold Paole

In 1725, Petar Blagojevic a Serbian peasant died in his hometown. Soon after his death, 9 villagers died under mysterious circumstances. Blagojevich's wife stated that he had visited her and asked her for his opanci (shoes); she then moved to another village for safety reasons. Authorities exhumed Blagojevic's body and it was found the body had not decomposed, and the corpse's hair and nails had grown. The villagers staked the corpse through the heart. Eyewitnesses said fresh blood poured from the wounds.

A year after Blagojevic's death, the village of Medveda saw their own mysterious deaths. The suspect responsible was Arnold Paole, a Serbian hajduk. He had told people he had been attacked by a vampire as Gossowa, and he had eaten soil from the vampire's grave to cure himself. Paole died after falling from a hay cart and breaking his neck in 1726. Four people who said he had visited them after his death, sickened and died.

Austrian authorities sent medics to investigate the case. Paole was disinterred and like Blagojevic, his body was said not to have decomposed, and his hair and nails had grown. The body and coffin were smeared with blood, and a stake was driven through the corpse's heart. According to reports the dead man screamed out. The body was dismembered and burned. Another 12 people died supposedly from vampirism in the following five years. In total 17 people who had died in the vicinity were exhumed and executed, with their hearts and heads removed and their ashes scattered in the river.

A rock was inserted into the mouth of a 10-year-old to keep the deceased child from rising from the grave and spreading malaria, researchers believe.

In a 5th century, Italian cemetery a 10-year-old child is buried in a manner indicating that there was fear he would, like a vampire, rise from his grave and claim the living as his victim.

The child's remains were found in a makeshift tomb in an abandoned Roman villa of Lugano in Teverina, Italy. Excavations dating to 1987 showed that the villa collapsed in the 3rd century A.D., and was subsequently turned into La Necropoli dei Bambini, which translates to the Cemetery of the Babies.

They found evidence of ritual magic practiced during the burial process. Findings include raven talons, bronze cauldrons of ash, toad bones and the remains of puppies that appear to have been sacrificed and buried alongside the remains of young children.

Archaeologists came across deviant burials that they considered quite eerie. The body of a three-year-old girl was found with stones placed on her hands and feet, perhaps to encourage her to stay put in her grave.

Among these burials is one that is even stranger, and which is now being called the Vampire of Lugano. The bones of a 10-year-old girl was found with a piece of limestone inside its mouth. This was done as part of a ritual to keep him from rising and infecting the community with the disease that most likely killed him which was malaria. The skull also showed evidence of an abscessed tooth, which could have been caused by the illness.

What was also strange was that all of the 60-odd children discovered in the Babies' Cemetery they were mostly newborn and under three years old, leading experts to assume that the necropolis was intended exclusively for babies and toddlers. The reason why this older child was buried there remains a mystery.

The excavations on the archaeological site have found that under the Roman building foundation there is another older complex which could reveal other mysteries of the past.

A plague victim was buried with a brick of moderate size inside the oral cavity, keeping the mandible wide open

Despite hundreds of years between the burials, another instance of the same custom was found in Venice in the grave of a woman buried during the 16th or 17th century. The cemetery was located on the island of Nuovo Lazzaretto, which was filled with plague victims. Her skeleton too was found with a large stone inside her mouth. The archaeologists believe the logic behind this practice was the fear that these victims would return from the dead, and that the stone would somehow bind them to the earth they were buried in.

The Venetian ritual confirmed "the intimate belief held at those times, between the plague and the mythological character of the vampire". The insertion of a rock or brick in the mouth of a corpse has no reference, even folkloric for this practice. Despite Venice being considered a very cosmopolitan city during the time of the woman's burial, there was superstition, but there no exorcism practiced on the corpse of a deceased person.