I watched a really interesting documentary a few nights ago. It was called The Vampire Burials, and it investigated some very strange burials that have been found in Britain and Ireland. They showed the excavation in Ireland, where as many as 2,000 people had been buried over a period of time, many in shallow graves, and often with some degree of weirdness. One guy had all his limbs broken and had been bound to a huge (roughly 2' x 2' x 1') lump of stone, and then buried. Others had large black, triangular chunks of rock forced into their mouth before being buried. Some had also had massive iron nails driven through them to hold them in their coffin, and one through the heart for good measure.
They went back and looked at historical texts, one of which was by a party of Austrian military surgeons who had gone into Romania with the intention of debunking the latest outbreaks of vampirism. They reported bodies in an unnatural state of preservation, with blood issuing from the mouth, blood lying uncongealed in the hearts of the bodies they dissected. All was explained by modern science, but it still leaves you wondering. They are still digging up revenants in Romania and Hungary to this day. They featured one case in the programme.
Interesting stuff :afro:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revenant
I wonder how many of those stories were due to people digging themselves out of graves after mistakenly having been buried alive. :scratch:
Oh, that gave me chills! How disturbing.
They were saying quite often you'll come across bodies contorted in some really strange poses, but apparently you can't read too much into it, because many of the bodies would have swollen to bursting point, and then, kabloey -- weird pose. One of the researchers was telling about accounts where people described walking through the graveyards and hearing the sound of bodies exploding underground in their coffins. Disgusting.
You have got to wonder just how many of them woke up in the coffin, though. It must have happened quite a lot, I reckon. :/
Exploding corpses! That's amazing, Ed! And utterly vile haha