Real Vampire Dug Up in Italy
Since much of the Twilight sequel, New Moon, takes place in Italy (the Volturi segments, at least), I decided to do a little Googling and learn about some vampire supersitions in Italy.
In March, the Associated Press reported that the remains of a woman believed to be a 16th Century vampire were dug up north of Venice in 2006.
Apparently, it was an old Italian tradition to bury believed vampires with a brick in their mouth.
This is the first instance of actual archeaological evidence of real vampires. The remains were dated and the woman was believed to have died during a plague. There was another mass grave nearby.
Texts from the medieval period describe that people believed in vampires because they were disturbed by the way decomposing bodies looked. People had to see them during epidemics because mass graves had to be reopened in order to bury the freshly dead. The decomposing bodies often had blood spewing out of their mouths. This led to the belief that the undead (or already dead) feasted on blood. Also, often there were holes in the burial shrouds over the corpse’s mouth, leading people to believe that they were eating their shrouds. Believed vampires were often called “shroud eaters.”
Obviously, thanks to modern science, we know that blood seeps out of a corpse’s mouth due to the decomposition of its organs.
Back in the 16th Century, a stake through the heard wasn’t enough to kill a vampire. They had to put a brick in its mouth, in order to make it starve.
The woman was believed to have been 60 at the time of death, and the brick was probably placed in her mouth by a priest or a grave digger, after the grave was redug. Italian anthropologists explain this away by saying that Italians created vampire myths because they didn’t know about bacteria or the spread of disease.
But…maybe this woman was a Volturi member! I guess we’ll never know the vampire secrets until we’re bitten…
