Italian researchers believe they have found the remains of a female “vampire” in Venice, buried with a brick jammed between her jaws to prevent her feeding on victims of a plague which swept the city in the 16th century.
Matteo Borrini, an anthropologist from the University of Florence, said the discovery on the small island of Lazzaretto Nuovo in the Venice lagoon supported the medieval belief that vampires were behind the spread of plagues like the Black Death.
“This is the first time that archaeology has succeeded in reconstructing the ritual of exorcism of a vampire,” Mr Borrini said.
“This helps … authenticate how the myth of vampires was born.”
The skeleton was unearthed in a mass grave from the Venetian plague of 1576 – in which the artist Titian died – on Lazzaretto Nuovo, which lies around three kilometres north-east of Venice and was used as a sanatorium for plague sufferers.
History of the Vampire
Vampire myths and legends go back hundreds, and thousands of years. They occur in almost every culture. The different types are many, although the vampires we are familiar with today, are mainly based on Eastern European myths.
The modern concept of a vampire retains many of the original traits from the East European stories. Traits such as drinking blood, preying on humans, only coming our at night, rising from the dead. Other aspects of the Vampire, such as Goth type clothing, cloaks, turning in to bats etc are much newer innovations.
Other features of some of the old myths are now all but gone, such as sprinkling salt, or seeds over the Vampire in order to keep them counting all night, rather than preying on human blood.
Vampire beliefs in the world today
There are many places in the world where people still believe in Vampires to this day. Many of the modern day believers have been greatly influenced by the depiction of Vampires in film and fiction. The was a Vampire scare in London as recently as 1970 where Vampire hunters flocked to see what they could do. During 2002 and 2003 there were a number of alleged Vampire attacks carried out in Malawi. This created mass hysteria in the population and several people were killed while looking for the Vampire. In Romania in 2004 several people believed that one of there relatives had turned in to a vampire. They dug up his body, ripped out the heart, burned it, mixed it with water and drank it.
