Mysteries of the vampire skeletons

I guess a lot of people on here probably already know what a revenant is.

But did you know that the word “revenant” is also the proper, scientific name that archaeologists use for any kind of vampire, zombie or ghoul that comes back from the dead to haunt the living?

Now, I know what you’re thinking: why in the name of the sweet chocolate Christ do archaeologists even have a name for such scientifically impossible creatures? Well the answer turns out to be uniquely fascinating.

In our safe and enlightened times, these various species of the horrifying undead are taken by the establishment to be the figments of the ugly underbelly of the human imagination. Yet in ages past, such things were considered to be very real, and to constitute a serious danger to the populations that cringed in the unlit darkness of their draughty homes at night.

In fact, so real were these ghastly creatures taken to be, that fearsome measures were occasionally invoked to prevent a corpse from rising out of the earth to make its ghastly way in the world for a second, unnatural time.

Large boulders might be smashed down onto the cadaver during burial, nails could be driven through its heart and vital organs to pin it into place, or its cold limbs could be broken and twisted to cripple its reanimated gait and give its warm victims a fighting chance of escape.

Heart warming tales

Or, if you couldn’t afford the muscle and expertise to crush and bind the mortal remains of your nearest and dearest, you could always plump for the cheaper option of ramming a large triangular rock between their silent jaws, presumably to prevent them from biting you and spreading their foul contagion to the living, should they be unable to resist the urge to climb out of the ground and go hunting for Christian souls to nibble on.

If that isn’t gruesome enough for you, to put a stop to the unauthorised nocturnal excursions of known nightwalkers, their hibernating remains would be exhumed in daylight and eviscerated, so that a choice smattering of their internal organs, typically including the heart, could be torn out and cremated, usually at a crossroads nearby.

And, as Jennifer Aniston used to say, here comes the science:

Well preserved graves containing clear evidence of these well-intentioned mutilations are now commonly being turned up in archaeological sites dating back nearly a thousand years, though some are far more chillingly modern, and to support those more recent finds, fascinating and well-written documentation has also been unearthed.

For example, in the 18^th Century, a group of military surgeons – the most highly trained, scientific and sceptical minds of their day – were sent to Eastern Europe to debunk a local plague of vampires. Their detailed field notes relate how the exhumed corpses of several of these suspected bloodsuckers were brought before them after several months underground.

To their shock and disbelief, the bodies were undecayed, plump and healthy, with clear evidence of fresh blood around their mouths. They had no choice but to declare the infestation genuine and order the ritual desecration and destruction of the unholy remains.

Well that’s just swell

Of course, a modern mortician will tell you that a human cadaver, buried in late autumn, will look relatively hale and hearty, should you feel moved to dig it up for a quick look before the warm weather of the following spring brings it to ripen.

You see, a corpse in a cold grave rots from within. Something those battlefield experts had probably never seen, being more used to putting people in the ground rather than pulling them out of it. This internal putrefaction creates a lot of gas in the body cavities and under the skin, giving it that plump and just-fed, happy look. That same internal pressure will force the stewing stomach contents to leak from the mouth, looking for all the world like a beard of fresh blood and presto! You have all the evidence of vampirism that an untrained eye could wish for.

But just in case you think that the rise of western medical expertise marks the final resting place of these medieval misconceptions, I should warn you that this necromaniacal perplexity didn’t end a couple of hundred years ago. There was a celebrated case in the 1990’s in Romania, where some woman was convinced that one of her deceased male relatives was swanning around the village in his death shroud after dark. 

Understandably alarmed, some of the local menfolk took it upon themselves to dig up the restless corpse and have a look for themselves.

Sure enough, when they got the casket open, he looked pretty good for someone who’d bought the farm a few months ago, and there was clear evidence of blood around his mouth. When they cut him open to get his heart out so that they could give it a decent, Christian roasting at the nearest crossroads, he let out a couple of loud grunts at which point one of the team felt moved to leap out of the grave and return home at full pelt  - no doubt to retrieve fresh underwear.

In the cold light of day, it’s easy to speculate about stomach gases being forced through vocal cords by the pressure of the knife against the gastric wall, but I’m going to cut the grave robber some slack and say that had I been up to my dick in a grave with a rotting corpse apparently verbally objecting to being split in half, I’d probably have shat my pants too.

At any rate, according to people fortunate enough to live in modern day rural Romania, this sort of thing happens all the time. I can’t think why I’ve never seen this in a Go Romania! package holiday brochure…

Sometimes, dead is bitter

Another intriguing aspect of revenant archaeology, is that there’s often an upsurge in this kind of unusual burial whenever Christianity replaces an indigenous religion. The scientific speculation is that the bloody persecution that necessarily accompanies the forcible conversion of amoral souls to the one true faith causes a lot of bad dreams, and an irrational dread of a lot of angry dead people.

I can see some truth in this, but to this patchwork of guesses and amateur psychological piffle, I would add the following observations:

Firstly, there’s the issue of the Christian burial. When traditional methods of dealing with the bodies of the dead such as cremation or charnel housing are replaced by the seemingly unnatural and unholy practice of sticking ones ancestors into a deep hole in the wet ground, it is quite understandable that some people are going to worry that their relatives haven’t been dealt with properly and aren’t going to stay dead very long.

And secondly – and this is my favourite – the books of the Bible are full of stories about people coming back from the dead; after all, Lazarus has become synonymous with the return from the grave. There’s a rich smattering of revenant references throughout the New Testament, for example: “the dead in Christ shall rise” (1 Thessalonians 4:16) and let’s not forget JC himself, the most famous revenant in history, who’s startling reluctance to stay buried was the party piece that sparked a two thousand year celebration.

Such delicious irony to think that today’s cultural plague of zombies and vampires is nothing less than a shadowy reflection of the Christian faith, implanted in reluctant pagan minds over the course of a thousand dark years of oppression, now flowering in an age when the iron grip of the church has finally slackened.

I like to think of them as the vengeful corpses of vanished ways of life, wriggling up out of the soil of history to wander and groan through the streets of a religious citadel in decline. 

But if you want to see the brilliant TV show that inspired this blog, go here: http://www.channel5.com/shows/revealed/episodes/mysteries-of-the-vampire-skeletons-revealed