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Vampire skull found in Venice


Halororor

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Scientists found the skull, with its mouth agape and a large slab of rock forced into its mouth, while excavating a mass grave dating from the Middle Ages on an island near Venice.

 

Female "vampires" were often blamed for spreading the plague epidemics through Europe, said Matteo Borrini of Florence University.

 

Wedging a rock or brick into the mouth of a suspected vampire was a way of preventing the person from feeding on the bodies of other plague victims and rising from the grave to attack the living, he told a meeting of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences in Denver last week.

The idea that plague victims might also be vampires may have arisen because blood often dribbled from the mouths of those who died from the disease.

 

The woman's skeleton was found in a mass grave which was established on the island of Lazzaretto Nuovo, in Venice's lagoon, when plague swept the city in 1576.

 

Dr Borrini said gravediggers shoved the brick into the woman's mouth with such force that it broke some of her teeth.

 

Gravediggers would check corpses for any sign that they had bitten or chewed on their shrouds – a sure sign of vampirism, he said.

 

Venice was particularly hard hit by the plague – when a later wave of the Black Death swept through the city between 1630 and 1631, the epidemic killed 50,000 out of the population of 150,000.

 

The skull could be the first such "vampire" to have been forensically examined, Mr Borrini said.

 

However, another expert in the field said he had found similar skeletons in Poland.

 

While the discovery was exciting, "claiming it as the first vampire is a little ridiculous" Peer Moore-Jansen of Wichita State University in Kansas told New Scientist magazine.

 

Source

 

Eh? Crazy of you ask me. Just some silly superstition and now everybody's puzzled about it.

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Vampires + Witches + Ladies + Scooby Doo = (Calculator responded in error.)

 

anyways, I Don't believe in vampires or Witches because their only simple stories to keep us away from reality, thus resulting in believing every thing you hear = becoming crazy.(lol)

 

but is Vampirism true? No, because it's only stories. by hearing these stories people will believe in such crap. and then they will believe in another crap, and another crap and another...

and at the end of this endless cycle the only thing that remains is "Crap".

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I do believe in vampires, just not the type depicted in modern stories or even any of the widely known varieties. For me vampires are just normal people who drink blood (and there are loads of people who do). No mystical powers. No fangs. Nothing. Just normal people with a bit of a psychic problem..
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Well if you read about the Dark Ages they would blame people for the strangest things

 

The "witch" this was usually a girl or woman who showed any intellegence , refused the advances of a nobel or town leader, could heal people through the use of herbs or shock horror could swim.

 

They would test her ability as a witch in a number of ways:

 

Tie rocks to her and throw her in the river. If she floated she was a witch, if she sunk and drowned she wasnt.

 

Tie her to a stake on top of a pile of wood and set it on fire. If she did not burn to death........you guessed it she was a witch.

 

Definstration (throw someone off a high cliff or building) if she flew she was a witch.

 

Place her right hand in oil....now if it burnt she wasnt a witch but lived with a disability that usually meant her death,

 

Now they believe 20 - 25 million women were killed when they were accused of being a witch in the Dark Age period.

 

Its quite ironical how we romanticise witches vampires werewolves etc which generally came from the imaginations of the fearful unenlightened people through our media in the form of movies, TV series and Vid games.

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