#restless-dead — Public Fediverse posts

When the Dead Don’t Stay Dead

There are few things that humanity has been quite so consistently afraid of as a dead person who refuses to behave like one.

Long before Dracula acquired his cape and Rick Grimes rode his horse into Atlanta, people across Europe were burying there dead with precautions. Stones were placed over bodies, heads were removed and limbs were restrained, Corpses were turned face down and objects were placed across throats and stomachs. Graves were reopened and their occupants subjected to considerably more indignity than most of us would consider reasonable after death. Because, apparently, sometimes being dead isn’t enough.

The modern vampire is a glamorous creature. Pale, beautiful, immortal and, generally speaking, blessed with excellent cheekbones, it bears little resemblance to it’s folkloric ancestors. The older revenant was something far less appealing. In fact, it was a corpse – and most of the time, not a particularly pleasant one.

Medieval accounts contain stories of dead people returning to their communities, wandering at night, attacking the living, spreading disease or simply making such a nuisance of themselves that somebody eventually dug them up and did something drastic about it.

Britain had it’s own troublesome dead. The twelfth century chronicler, William of Newburgh recorded several stories of corpses apparently leaving their graves. In one, a wicked man in Buckinghamshire was said to return after burial and terrorise his wife and neighbours.

Eventually, his grave was opened and the body, according to William’s account, had not decayed as expected. The solution for this weird turn of events was not subtle. His heart was removed and burned.

We have to remember that William was not writing a vampire novel. He was writing history. To him and his contemporeries, tales of the restless dead existed within a world in which supernatural explanations for misfortunes were entirely plausible.

Disease made the phenomenon considerably more frightening. When people began dying after the death of a particular individual, suspicion could often fall on the corpse itself. Without knowledge of bacteria, viruses or the mechanisms of infection, the sequence could appear horribly straightforward – someone dies, they are buried, then their family begins dying too. Something must be coming back from the grave. And if opening that grave revealed a corpse that didn’t look sufficiently decomposed, the evidence might have seen overwhelming.

Unfortunately, decomposition is complicated. Bodies do not decay to a convenient timetable. Temperature, moisture, soil chemistry, depth of burial, clothing, coffin construction, body composition and countless other factors affect what happens after death. A corpse exhumed weeks or months later might look very different from what frightened villagers expected. Natural post mortem changes could make matters worse. Skin can retract making hair and nails appear to have continued growing. Gases produced during decomposition can swell the abdomen. Fluids may emerge from the nose and mouth. Internal pressure can produce sounds. Then there was the blood. A body opened after burial might have contained dark fluids mistaken for fresh blood, then suddenly the community had proof. The dead man had been feeding. To someone already convinced the dead had been wandering around at night, none of this can have been particularly reassuring.

During outbreaks of disease in parts of Eastern and Central Europe, suspected vampires were exhumed and examined. Reports describing apparently undecayed bodies, blood around mouths and other supposedly unnatural signs circulated far beyond the villages where the events occurred, until by the eighteenth century, vampire panics had become sufficiently troublesome to attract the attention of physicians, officials and scholars.

Across Europe, people developed a variety of methods intended – or later interpreted – to prevent troublesome corpses from returning. Some were decapitated, some were buried face down, some had heavy stones placed on them. Yet others were pinned, restrained or otherwise treated in ways archaeologists now describe cautiously as unusual, atypical or deviant burials.

Finding a skeleton with a stone rammed into it’s moth does not necessarily indicate that somebody believed they had buried Count Dracula. Burial practices can have many explanations. Punishment, social exclusion, execution, religious belief, disease precautions, fear of grave disturbance and local funerary customs can all leave strange archaeological signatures. Those things don’t make good headlines though. ‘Vampire Burial Discovery’ though? That’ll get the views.

One particularly interesting discovery came from Drawsko in Poland, where several seventeenth and eighteenth century burials included iron sickles placed across the bodies among other unusual measures found in the cemetery. The discoveries obviously became known as ‘vampire burials’, but the reality is actually more interesting than the headline.

Researchers have explored whether these individuals were outsiders, victims of disease, people regarded as dangerous after death or simply participants in a funerary tradition whose precise meaning has been lost. Do the researcher consider the occupants of the sickle graves to have been believed to be vampires? I’d say they were uncertain of why they were interred in this manner.

The history of the restless dead isn’t really a history of monsters, it’s a history of frightened people trying to understand death. Imagine living in a village where disease has begun moving from house to house. There are no microscopes, no germ theory, no antibiotics, no understanding of contagion remotely resembling ours.

What you DO know is that old Thomas died first, then his wife became ill, then his children, then the neighbours…

And someone remembers seeing old Thomas near the road after dark. Perhaps it was another man. Perhaps it was a shadow. Perhaps nobody saw anything at all until the story started circulating.

Soon, somebody suggests opening Thomas’s grave, and when they do, his body isn’t as decayed as everyone expected. Now the village has an answer – it’s the wrong one, but it is an answer.

And that’s an important thing about supernatural belief – It gives shape to chaos. Disease becomes a vampire. Bad luck becomes a curse. A strange noise becomes a ghost. The terrifying randomness of death becomes something with a name, a cause and – most importantly – a possible solution. Dig up the corpse, remove the head, burn the heart, put something heavy over the grave.

Do ‘Something’.

The rituals surrounding dangerous dead people may look macabre to our modern eyes, but undeath them lies something very familiar – Fear, grief and the desperate human need to believe that catastrophe can be controlled.

Even Britain, supposedly safe from the great vampire panics of Eastern Europe, had it’s fair share of stories about people who refused to stay peacefully buried. Medieval chroniclers described walking corpses. Later centuries brought fears of grave robbery, disturbed remains and the ‘Resurrection Men’.

The Victorians developed an entirely different anxiety around the grave: what if the person inside it wasn’t actually dead? They dealt with the anxiety as they normally did – cleverly. Safety coffins, mortuaries where bodies could be observed for signs of life, bells and signalling devices were patented so that the unfortunate prematurely interred might theoretically announce that their funeral had been somewhat premature.

Meanwhile, mortsafes – heavy iron cages placed over graves, particularly in Scotland, from a much more real threat. The Resurrection Men.

These days, photographs of mortsafes appear regularly online labelled as ‘Vampire Cages’, installed to keep the dead from climbing out. They weren’t. They were intended to stop the living from getting in, which, frankly, is somehow even more grim.

And then there are the bodies that just seem to refuse to do what we expect. Saints whose remains are declared incorrupt. Bodies naturally preserved dry air, cold, peat bogs or unusual burial conditions. Corpses transformed into adipocere, a waxy substance produced under certain conditions. Mummies created deliberately. Mummies created by accident. Every generation encounters the same unsettling truth. Death does not always look the way we expect it to. The way we think it should look. And for most of human history, that uncertainty has left plenty of room for the supernatural.

This week, Mysterious Times is opening the grave.

(Not literally. We have standards. Mostly.)

We’ll be meeting Britain’s medieval revenants, examining so-called vampire graves, looking at the genuine terror of premature burial, investigating the iron cages sometimes incorrectly claimed to imprison vampires and exploring the extraordinary cases in which the dead appeared to resist death itself.

Some of the stories will be folklore, some will be archaeology, some will be misunderstandings. And occasionally the truth will turn out to be considerably stranger than the supernatural explanation. Because humanity has spent thousands of years worrying about what happens after we die, but every now and again, we’ve been even more worried about what happens if we come back.

Welcome to The Dead Don’t Rest Week.

Please keep your hands inside the graveyard at all times.

When the Dead Don’t Stay Dead

There are few things that humanity has been quite so consistently afraid of as a dead person who refuses to behave like one.

Long before Dracula acquired his cape and Rick Grimes rode his horse into Atlanta, people across Europe were burying there dead with precautions. Stones were placed over bodies, heads were removed and limbs were restrained, Corpses were turned face down and objects were placed across throats and stomachs. Graves were reopened and their occupants subjected to considerably more indignity than most of us would consider reasonable after death. Because, apparently, sometimes being dead isn’t enough.

The modern vampire is a glamorous creature. Pale, beautiful, immortal and, generally speaking, blessed with excellent cheekbones, it bears little resemblance to it’s folkloric ancestors. The older revenant was something far less appealing. In fact, it was a corpse – and most of the time, not a particularly pleasant one.

Medieval accounts contain stories of dead people returning to their communities, wandering at night, attacking the living, spreading disease or simply making such a nuisance of themselves that somebody eventually dug them up and did something drastic about it.

Britain had it’s own troublesome dead. The twelfth century chronicler, William of Newburgh recorded several stories of corpses apparently leaving their graves. In one, a wicked man in Buckinghamshire was said to return after burial and terrorise his wife and neighbours.

Eventually, his grave was opened and the body, according to William’s account, had not decayed as expected. The solution for this weird turn of events was not subtle. His heart was removed and burned.

We have to remember that William was not writing a vampire novel. He was writing history. To him and his contemporeries, tales of the restless dead existed within a world in which supernatural explanations for misfortunes were entirely plausible.

Disease made the phenomenon considerably more frightening. When people began dying after the death of a particular individual, suspicion could often fall on the corpse itself. Without knowledge of bacteria, viruses or the mechanisms of infection, the sequence could appear horribly straightforward – someone dies, they are buried, then their family begins dying too. Something must be coming back from the grave. And if opening that grave revealed a corpse that didn’t look sufficiently decomposed, the evidence might have seen overwhelming.

Unfortunately, decomposition is complicated. Bodies do not decay to a convenient timetable. Temperature, moisture, soil chemistry, depth of burial, clothing, coffin construction, body composition and countless other factors affect what happens after death. A corpse exhumed weeks or months later might look very different from what frightened villagers expected. Natural post mortem changes could make matters worse. Skin can retract making hair and nails appear to have continued growing. Gases produced during decomposition can swell the abdomen. Fluids may emerge from the nose and mouth. Internal pressure can produce sounds. Then there was the blood. A body opened after burial might have contained dark fluids mistaken for fresh blood, then suddenly the community had proof. The dead man had been feeding. To someone already convinced the dead had been wandering around at night, none of this can have been particularly reassuring.

During outbreaks of disease in parts of Eastern and Central Europe, suspected vampires were exhumed and examined. Reports describing apparently undecayed bodies, blood around mouths and other supposedly unnatural signs circulated far beyond the villages where the events occurred, until by the eighteenth century, vampire panics had become sufficiently troublesome to attract the attention of physicians, officials and scholars.

Across Europe, people developed a variety of methods intended – or later interpreted – to prevent troublesome corpses from returning. Some were decapitated, some were buried face down, some had heavy stones placed on them. Yet others were pinned, restrained or otherwise treated in ways archaeologists now describe cautiously as unusual, atypical or deviant burials.

Finding a skeleton with a stone rammed into it’s moth does not necessarily indicate that somebody believed they had buried Count Dracula. Burial practices can have many explanations. Punishment, social exclusion, execution, religious belief, disease precautions, fear of grave disturbance and local funerary customs can all leave strange archaeological signatures. Those things don’t make good headlines though. ‘Vampire Burial Discovery’ though? That’ll get the views.

One particularly interesting discovery came from Drawsko in Poland, where several seventeenth and eighteenth century burials included iron sickles placed across the bodies among other unusual measures found in the cemetery. The discoveries obviously became known as ‘vampire burials’, but the reality is actually more interesting than the headline.

Researchers have explored whether these individuals were outsiders, victims of disease, people regarded as dangerous after death or simply participants in a funerary tradition whose precise meaning has been lost. Do the researcher consider the occupants of the sickle graves to have been believed to be vampires? I’d say they were uncertain of why they were interred in this manner.

The history of the restless dead isn’t really a history of monsters, it’s a history of frightened people trying to understand death. Imagine living in a village where disease has begun moving from house to house. There are no microscopes, no germ theory, no antibiotics, no understanding of contagion remotely resembling ours.

What you DO know is that old Thomas died first, then his wife became ill, then his children, then the neighbours…

And someone remembers seeing old Thomas near the road after dark. Perhaps it was another man. Perhaps it was a shadow. Perhaps nobody saw anything at all until the story started circulating.

Soon, somebody suggests opening Thomas’s grave, and when they do, his body isn’t as decayed as everyone expected. Now the village has an answer – it’s the wrong one, but it is an answer.

And that’s an important thing about supernatural belief – It gives shape to chaos. Disease becomes a vampire. Bad luck becomes a curse. A strange noise becomes a ghost. The terrifying randomness of death becomes something with a name, a cause and – most importantly – a possible solution. Dig up the corpse, remove the head, burn the heart, put something heavy over the grave.

Do ‘Something’.

The rituals surrounding dangerous dead people may look macabre to our modern eyes, but undeath them lies something very familiar – Fear, grief and the desperate human need to believe that catastrophe can be controlled.

Even Britain, supposedly safe from the great vampire panics of Eastern Europe, had it’s fair share of stories about people who refused to stay peacefully buried. Medieval chroniclers described walking corpses. Later centuries brought fears of grave robbery, disturbed remains and the ‘Resurrection Men’.

The Victorians developed an entirely different anxiety around the grave: what if the person inside it wasn’t actually dead? They dealt with the anxiety as they normally did – cleverly. Safety coffins, mortuaries where bodies could be observed for signs of life, bells and signalling devices were patented so that the unfortunate prematurely interred might theoretically announce that their funeral had been somewhat premature.

Meanwhile, mortsafes – heavy iron cages placed over graves, particularly in Scotland, from a much more real threat. The Resurrection Men.

These days, photographs of mortsafes appear regularly online labelled as ‘Vampire Cages’, installed to keep the dead from climbing out. They weren’t. They were intended to stop the living from getting in, which, frankly, is somehow even more grim.

And then there are the bodies that just seem to refuse to do what we expect. Saints whose remains are declared incorrupt. Bodies naturally preserved dry air, cold, peat bogs or unusual burial conditions. Corpses transformed into adipocere, a waxy substance produced under certain conditions. Mummies created deliberately. Mummies created by accident. Every generation encounters the same unsettling truth. Death does not always look the way we expect it to. The way we think it should look. And for most of human history, that uncertainty has left plenty of room for the supernatural.

This week, Mysterious Times is opening the grave.

(Not literally. We have standards. Mostly.)

We’ll be meeting Britain’s medieval revenants, examining so-called vampire graves, looking at the genuine terror of premature burial, investigating the iron cages sometimes incorrectly claimed to imprison vampires and exploring the extraordinary cases in which the dead appeared to resist death itself.

Some of the stories will be folklore, some will be archaeology, some will be misunderstandings. And occasionally the truth will turn out to be considerably stranger than the supernatural explanation. Because humanity has spent thousands of years worrying about what happens after we die, but every now and again, we’ve been even more worried about what happens if we come back.

Welcome to The Dead Don’t Rest Week.

Please keep your hands inside the graveyard at all times.

When the Dead Don’t Stay Dead

There are few things that humanity has been quite so consistently afraid of as a dead person who refuses to behave like one.

Long before Dracula acquired his cape and Rick Grimes rode his horse into Atlanta, people across Europe were burying there dead with precautions. Stones were placed over bodies, heads were removed and limbs were restrained, Corpses were turned face down and objects were placed across throats and stomachs. Graves were reopened and their occupants subjected to considerably more indignity than most of us would consider reasonable after death. Because, apparently, sometimes being dead isn’t enough.

The modern vampire is a glamorous creature. Pale, beautiful, immortal and, generally speaking, blessed with excellent cheekbones, it bears little resemblance to it’s folkloric ancestors. The older revenant was something far less appealing. In fact, it was a corpse – and most of the time, not a particularly pleasant one.

Medieval accounts contain stories of dead people returning to their communities, wandering at night, attacking the living, spreading disease or simply making such a nuisance of themselves that somebody eventually dug them up and did something drastic about it.

Britain had it’s own troublesome dead. The twelfth century chronicler, William of Newburgh recorded several stories of corpses apparently leaving their graves. In one, a wicked man in Buckinghamshire was said to return after burial and terrorise his wife and neighbours.

Eventually, his grave was opened and the body, according to William’s account, had not decayed as expected. The solution for this weird turn of events was not subtle. His heart was removed and burned.

We have to remember that William was not writing a vampire novel. He was writing history. To him and his contemporeries, tales of the restless dead existed within a world in which supernatural explanations for misfortunes were entirely plausible.

Disease made the phenomenon considerably more frightening. When people began dying after the death of a particular individual, suspicion could often fall on the corpse itself. Without knowledge of bacteria, viruses or the mechanisms of infection, the sequence could appear horribly straightforward – someone dies, they are buried, then their family begins dying too. Something must be coming back from the grave. And if opening that grave revealed a corpse that didn’t look sufficiently decomposed, the evidence might have seen overwhelming.

Unfortunately, decomposition is complicated. Bodies do not decay to a convenient timetable. Temperature, moisture, soil chemistry, depth of burial, clothing, coffin construction, body composition and countless other factors affect what happens after death. A corpse exhumed weeks or months later might look very different from what frightened villagers expected. Natural post mortem changes could make matters worse. Skin can retract making hair and nails appear to have continued growing. Gases produced during decomposition can swell the abdomen. Fluids may emerge from the nose and mouth. Internal pressure can produce sounds. Then there was the blood. A body opened after burial might have contained dark fluids mistaken for fresh blood, then suddenly the community had proof. The dead man had been feeding. To someone already convinced the dead had been wandering around at night, none of this can have been particularly reassuring.

During outbreaks of disease in parts of Eastern and Central Europe, suspected vampires were exhumed and examined. Reports describing apparently undecayed bodies, blood around mouths and other supposedly unnatural signs circulated far beyond the villages where the events occurred, until by the eighteenth century, vampire panics had become sufficiently troublesome to attract the attention of physicians, officials and scholars.

Across Europe, people developed a variety of methods intended – or later interpreted – to prevent troublesome corpses from returning. Some were decapitated, some were buried face down, some had heavy stones placed on them. Yet others were pinned, restrained or otherwise treated in ways archaeologists now describe cautiously as unusual, atypical or deviant burials.

Finding a skeleton with a stone rammed into it’s moth does not necessarily indicate that somebody believed they had buried Count Dracula. Burial practices can have many explanations. Punishment, social exclusion, execution, religious belief, disease precautions, fear of grave disturbance and local funerary customs can all leave strange archaeological signatures. Those things don’t make good headlines though. ‘Vampire Burial Discovery’ though? That’ll get the views.

One particularly interesting discovery came from Drawsko in Poland, where several seventeenth and eighteenth century burials included iron sickles placed across the bodies among other unusual measures found in the cemetery. The discoveries obviously became known as ‘vampire burials’, but the reality is actually more interesting than the headline.

Researchers have explored whether these individuals were outsiders, victims of disease, people regarded as dangerous after death or simply participants in a funerary tradition whose precise meaning has been lost. Do the researcher consider the occupants of the sickle graves to have been believed to be vampires? I’d say they were uncertain of why they were interred in this manner.

The history of the restless dead isn’t really a history of monsters, it’s a history of frightened people trying to understand death. Imagine living in a village where disease has begun moving from house to house. There are no microscopes, no germ theory, no antibiotics, no understanding of contagion remotely resembling ours.

What you DO know is that old Thomas died first, then his wife became ill, then his children, then the neighbours…

And someone remembers seeing old Thomas near the road after dark. Perhaps it was another man. Perhaps it was a shadow. Perhaps nobody saw anything at all until the story started circulating.

Soon, somebody suggests opening Thomas’s grave, and when they do, his body isn’t as decayed as everyone expected. Now the village has an answer – it’s the wrong one, but it is an answer.

And that’s an important thing about supernatural belief – It gives shape to chaos. Disease becomes a vampire. Bad luck becomes a curse. A strange noise becomes a ghost. The terrifying randomness of death becomes something with a name, a cause and – most importantly – a possible solution. Dig up the corpse, remove the head, burn the heart, put something heavy over the grave.

Do ‘Something’.

The rituals surrounding dangerous dead people may look macabre to our modern eyes, but undeath them lies something very familiar – Fear, grief and the desperate human need to believe that catastrophe can be controlled.

Even Britain, supposedly safe from the great vampire panics of Eastern Europe, had it’s fair share of stories about people who refused to stay peacefully buried. Medieval chroniclers described walking corpses. Later centuries brought fears of grave robbery, disturbed remains and the ‘Resurrection Men’.

The Victorians developed an entirely different anxiety around the grave: what if the person inside it wasn’t actually dead? They dealt with the anxiety as they normally did – cleverly. Safety coffins, mortuaries where bodies could be observed for signs of life, bells and signalling devices were patented so that the unfortunate prematurely interred might theoretically announce that their funeral had been somewhat premature.

Meanwhile, mortsafes – heavy iron cages placed over graves, particularly in Scotland, from a much more real threat. The Resurrection Men.

These days, photographs of mortsafes appear regularly online labelled as ‘Vampire Cages’, installed to keep the dead from climbing out. They weren’t. They were intended to stop the living from getting in, which, frankly, is somehow even more grim.

And then there are the bodies that just seem to refuse to do what we expect. Saints whose remains are declared incorrupt. Bodies naturally preserved dry air, cold, peat bogs or unusual burial conditions. Corpses transformed into adipocere, a waxy substance produced under certain conditions. Mummies created deliberately. Mummies created by accident. Every generation encounters the same unsettling truth. Death does not always look the way we expect it to. The way we think it should look. And for most of human history, that uncertainty has left plenty of room for the supernatural.

This week, Mysterious Times is opening the grave.

(Not literally. We have standards. Mostly.)

We’ll be meeting Britain’s medieval revenants, examining so-called vampire graves, looking at the genuine terror of premature burial, investigating the iron cages sometimes incorrectly claimed to imprison vampires and exploring the extraordinary cases in which the dead appeared to resist death itself.

Some of the stories will be folklore, some will be archaeology, some will be misunderstandings. And occasionally the truth will turn out to be considerably stranger than the supernatural explanation. Because humanity has spent thousands of years worrying about what happens after we die, but every now and again, we’ve been even more worried about what happens if we come back.

Welcome to The Dead Don’t Rest Week.

Please keep your hands inside the graveyard at all times.

When the Dead Don’t Stay Dead

There are few things that humanity has been quite so consistently afraid of as a dead person who refuses to behave like one.

Long before Dracula acquired his cape and Rick Grimes rode his horse into Atlanta, people across Europe were burying there dead with precautions. Stones were placed over bodies, heads were removed and limbs were restrained, Corpses were turned face down and objects were placed across throats and stomachs. Graves were reopened and their occupants subjected to considerably more indignity than most of us would consider reasonable after death. Because, apparently, sometimes being dead isn’t enough.

The modern vampire is a glamorous creature. Pale, beautiful, immortal and, generally speaking, blessed with excellent cheekbones, it bears little resemblance to it’s folkloric ancestors. The older revenant was something far less appealing. In fact, it was a corpse – and most of the time, not a particularly pleasant one.

Medieval accounts contain stories of dead people returning to their communities, wandering at night, attacking the living, spreading disease or simply making such a nuisance of themselves that somebody eventually dug them up and did something drastic about it.

Britain had it’s own troublesome dead. The twelfth century chronicler, William of Newburgh recorded several stories of corpses apparently leaving their graves. In one, a wicked man in Buckinghamshire was said to return after burial and terrorise his wife and neighbours.

Eventually, his grave was opened and the body, according to William’s account, had not decayed as expected. The solution for this weird turn of events was not subtle. His heart was removed and burned.

We have to remember that William was not writing a vampire novel. He was writing history. To him and his contemporeries, tales of the restless dead existed within a world in which supernatural explanations for misfortunes were entirely plausible.

Disease made the phenomenon considerably more frightening. When people began dying after the death of a particular individual, suspicion could often fall on the corpse itself. Without knowledge of bacteria, viruses or the mechanisms of infection, the sequence could appear horribly straightforward – someone dies, they are buried, then their family begins dying too. Something must be coming back from the grave. And if opening that grave revealed a corpse that didn’t look sufficiently decomposed, the evidence might have seen overwhelming.

Unfortunately, decomposition is complicated. Bodies do not decay to a convenient timetable. Temperature, moisture, soil chemistry, depth of burial, clothing, coffin construction, body composition and countless other factors affect what happens after death. A corpse exhumed weeks or months later might look very different from what frightened villagers expected. Natural post mortem changes could make matters worse. Skin can retract making hair and nails appear to have continued growing. Gases produced during decomposition can swell the abdomen. Fluids may emerge from the nose and mouth. Internal pressure can produce sounds. Then there was the blood. A body opened after burial might have contained dark fluids mistaken for fresh blood, then suddenly the community had proof. The dead man had been feeding. To someone already convinced the dead had been wandering around at night, none of this can have been particularly reassuring.

During outbreaks of disease in parts of Eastern and Central Europe, suspected vampires were exhumed and examined. Reports describing apparently undecayed bodies, blood around mouths and other supposedly unnatural signs circulated far beyond the villages where the events occurred, until by the eighteenth century, vampire panics had become sufficiently troublesome to attract the attention of physicians, officials and scholars.

Across Europe, people developed a variety of methods intended – or later interpreted – to prevent troublesome corpses from returning. Some were decapitated, some were buried face down, some had heavy stones placed on them. Yet others were pinned, restrained or otherwise treated in ways archaeologists now describe cautiously as unusual, atypical or deviant burials.

Finding a skeleton with a stone rammed into it’s moth does not necessarily indicate that somebody believed they had buried Count Dracula. Burial practices can have many explanations. Punishment, social exclusion, execution, religious belief, disease precautions, fear of grave disturbance and local funerary customs can all leave strange archaeological signatures. Those things don’t make good headlines though. ‘Vampire Burial Discovery’ though? That’ll get the views.

One particularly interesting discovery came from Drawsko in Poland, where several seventeenth and eighteenth century burials included iron sickles placed across the bodies among other unusual measures found in the cemetery. The discoveries obviously became known as ‘vampire burials’, but the reality is actually more interesting than the headline.

Researchers have explored whether these individuals were outsiders, victims of disease, people regarded as dangerous after death or simply participants in a funerary tradition whose precise meaning has been lost. Do the researcher consider the occupants of the sickle graves to have been believed to be vampires? I’d say they were uncertain of why they were interred in this manner.

The history of the restless dead isn’t really a history of monsters, it’s a history of frightened people trying to understand death. Imagine living in a village where disease has begun moving from house to house. There are no microscopes, no germ theory, no antibiotics, no understanding of contagion remotely resembling ours.

What you DO know is that old Thomas died first, then his wife became ill, then his children, then the neighbours…

And someone remembers seeing old Thomas near the road after dark. Perhaps it was another man. Perhaps it was a shadow. Perhaps nobody saw anything at all until the story started circulating.

Soon, somebody suggests opening Thomas’s grave, and when they do, his body isn’t as decayed as everyone expected. Now the village has an answer – it’s the wrong one, but it is an answer.

And that’s an important thing about supernatural belief – It gives shape to chaos. Disease becomes a vampire. Bad luck becomes a curse. A strange noise becomes a ghost. The terrifying randomness of death becomes something with a name, a cause and – most importantly – a possible solution. Dig up the corpse, remove the head, burn the heart, put something heavy over the grave.

Do ‘Something’.

The rituals surrounding dangerous dead people may look macabre to our modern eyes, but undeath them lies something very familiar – Fear, grief and the desperate human need to believe that catastrophe can be controlled.

Even Britain, supposedly safe from the great vampire panics of Eastern Europe, had it’s fair share of stories about people who refused to stay peacefully buried. Medieval chroniclers described walking corpses. Later centuries brought fears of grave robbery, disturbed remains and the ‘Resurrection Men’.

The Victorians developed an entirely different anxiety around the grave: what if the person inside it wasn’t actually dead? They dealt with the anxiety as they normally did – cleverly. Safety coffins, mortuaries where bodies could be observed for signs of life, bells and signalling devices were patented so that the unfortunate prematurely interred might theoretically announce that their funeral had been somewhat premature.

Meanwhile, mortsafes – heavy iron cages placed over graves, particularly in Scotland, from a much more real threat. The Resurrection Men.

These days, photographs of mortsafes appear regularly online labelled as ‘Vampire Cages’, installed to keep the dead from climbing out. They weren’t. They were intended to stop the living from getting in, which, frankly, is somehow even more grim.

And then there are the bodies that just seem to refuse to do what we expect. Saints whose remains are declared incorrupt. Bodies naturally preserved dry air, cold, peat bogs or unusual burial conditions. Corpses transformed into adipocere, a waxy substance produced under certain conditions. Mummies created deliberately. Mummies created by accident. Every generation encounters the same unsettling truth. Death does not always look the way we expect it to. The way we think it should look. And for most of human history, that uncertainty has left plenty of room for the supernatural.

This week, Mysterious Times is opening the grave.

(Not literally. We have standards. Mostly.)

We’ll be meeting Britain’s medieval revenants, examining so-called vampire graves, looking at the genuine terror of premature burial, investigating the iron cages sometimes incorrectly claimed to imprison vampires and exploring the extraordinary cases in which the dead appeared to resist death itself.

Some of the stories will be folklore, some will be archaeology, some will be misunderstandings. And occasionally the truth will turn out to be considerably stranger than the supernatural explanation. Because humanity has spent thousands of years worrying about what happens after we die, but every now and again, we’ve been even more worried about what happens if we come back.

Welcome to The Dead Don’t Rest Week.

Please keep your hands inside the graveyard at all times.

When the Dead Don’t Stay Dead

There are few things that humanity has been quite so consistently afraid of as a dead person who refuses to behave like one.

Long before Dracula acquired his cape and Rick Grimes rode his horse into Atlanta, people across Europe were burying there dead with precautions. Stones were placed over bodies, heads were removed and limbs were restrained, Corpses were turned face down and objects were placed across throats and stomachs. Graves were reopened and their occupants subjected to considerably more indignity than most of us would consider reasonable after death. Because, apparently, sometimes being dead isn’t enough.

The modern vampire is a glamorous creature. Pale, beautiful, immortal and, generally speaking, blessed with excellent cheekbones, it bears little resemblance to it’s folkloric ancestors. The older revenant was something far less appealing. In fact, it was a corpse – and most of the time, not a particularly pleasant one.

Medieval accounts contain stories of dead people returning to their communities, wandering at night, attacking the living, spreading disease or simply making such a nuisance of themselves that somebody eventually dug them up and did something drastic about it.

Britain had it’s own troublesome dead. The twelfth century chronicler, William of Newburgh recorded several stories of corpses apparently leaving their graves. In one, a wicked man in Buckinghamshire was said to return after burial and terrorise his wife and neighbours.

Eventually, his grave was opened and the body, according to William’s account, had not decayed as expected. The solution for this weird turn of events was not subtle. His heart was removed and burned.

We have to remember that William was not writing a vampire novel. He was writing history. To him and his contemporeries, tales of the restless dead existed within a world in which supernatural explanations for misfortunes were entirely plausible.

Disease made the phenomenon considerably more frightening. When people began dying after the death of a particular individual, suspicion could often fall on the corpse itself. Without knowledge of bacteria, viruses or the mechanisms of infection, the sequence could appear horribly straightforward – someone dies, they are buried, then their family begins dying too. Something must be coming back from the grave. And if opening that grave revealed a corpse that didn’t look sufficiently decomposed, the evidence might have seen overwhelming.

Unfortunately, decomposition is complicated. Bodies do not decay to a convenient timetable. Temperature, moisture, soil chemistry, depth of burial, clothing, coffin construction, body composition and countless other factors affect what happens after death. A corpse exhumed weeks or months later might look very different from what frightened villagers expected. Natural post mortem changes could make matters worse. Skin can retract making hair and nails appear to have continued growing. Gases produced during decomposition can swell the abdomen. Fluids may emerge from the nose and mouth. Internal pressure can produce sounds. Then there was the blood. A body opened after burial might have contained dark fluids mistaken for fresh blood, then suddenly the community had proof. The dead man had been feeding. To someone already convinced the dead had been wandering around at night, none of this can have been particularly reassuring.

During outbreaks of disease in parts of Eastern and Central Europe, suspected vampires were exhumed and examined. Reports describing apparently undecayed bodies, blood around mouths and other supposedly unnatural signs circulated far beyond the villages where the events occurred, until by the eighteenth century, vampire panics had become sufficiently troublesome to attract the attention of physicians, officials and scholars.

Across Europe, people developed a variety of methods intended – or later interpreted – to prevent troublesome corpses from returning. Some were decapitated, some were buried face down, some had heavy stones placed on them. Yet others were pinned, restrained or otherwise treated in ways archaeologists now describe cautiously as unusual, atypical or deviant burials.

Finding a skeleton with a stone rammed into it’s moth does not necessarily indicate that somebody believed they had buried Count Dracula. Burial practices can have many explanations. Punishment, social exclusion, execution, religious belief, disease precautions, fear of grave disturbance and local funerary customs can all leave strange archaeological signatures. Those things don’t make good headlines though. ‘Vampire Burial Discovery’ though? That’ll get the views.

One particularly interesting discovery came from Drawsko in Poland, where several seventeenth and eighteenth century burials included iron sickles placed across the bodies among other unusual measures found in the cemetery. The discoveries obviously became known as ‘vampire burials’, but the reality is actually more interesting than the headline.

Researchers have explored whether these individuals were outsiders, victims of disease, people regarded as dangerous after death or simply participants in a funerary tradition whose precise meaning has been lost. Do the researcher consider the occupants of the sickle graves to have been believed to be vampires? I’d say they were uncertain of why they were interred in this manner.

The history of the restless dead isn’t really a history of monsters, it’s a history of frightened people trying to understand death. Imagine living in a village where disease has begun moving from house to house. There are no microscopes, no germ theory, no antibiotics, no understanding of contagion remotely resembling ours.

What you DO know is that old Thomas died first, then his wife became ill, then his children, then the neighbours…

And someone remembers seeing old Thomas near the road after dark. Perhaps it was another man. Perhaps it was a shadow. Perhaps nobody saw anything at all until the story started circulating.

Soon, somebody suggests opening Thomas’s grave, and when they do, his body isn’t as decayed as everyone expected. Now the village has an answer – it’s the wrong one, but it is an answer.

And that’s an important thing about supernatural belief – It gives shape to chaos. Disease becomes a vampire. Bad luck becomes a curse. A strange noise becomes a ghost. The terrifying randomness of death becomes something with a name, a cause and – most importantly – a possible solution. Dig up the corpse, remove the head, burn the heart, put something heavy over the grave.

Do ‘Something’.

The rituals surrounding dangerous dead people may look macabre to our modern eyes, but undeath them lies something very familiar – Fear, grief and the desperate human need to believe that catastrophe can be controlled.

Even Britain, supposedly safe from the great vampire panics of Eastern Europe, had it’s fair share of stories about people who refused to stay peacefully buried. Medieval chroniclers described walking corpses. Later centuries brought fears of grave robbery, disturbed remains and the ‘Resurrection Men’.

The Victorians developed an entirely different anxiety around the grave: what if the person inside it wasn’t actually dead? They dealt with the anxiety as they normally did – cleverly. Safety coffins, mortuaries where bodies could be observed for signs of life, bells and signalling devices were patented so that the unfortunate prematurely interred might theoretically announce that their funeral had been somewhat premature.

Meanwhile, mortsafes – heavy iron cages placed over graves, particularly in Scotland, from a much more real threat. The Resurrection Men.

These days, photographs of mortsafes appear regularly online labelled as ‘Vampire Cages’, installed to keep the dead from climbing out. They weren’t. They were intended to stop the living from getting in, which, frankly, is somehow even more grim.

And then there are the bodies that just seem to refuse to do what we expect. Saints whose remains are declared incorrupt. Bodies naturally preserved dry air, cold, peat bogs or unusual burial conditions. Corpses transformed into adipocere, a waxy substance produced under certain conditions. Mummies created deliberately. Mummies created by accident. Every generation encounters the same unsettling truth. Death does not always look the way we expect it to. The way we think it should look. And for most of human history, that uncertainty has left plenty of room for the supernatural.

This week, Mysterious Times is opening the grave.

(Not literally. We have standards. Mostly.)

We’ll be meeting Britain’s medieval revenants, examining so-called vampire graves, looking at the genuine terror of premature burial, investigating the iron cages sometimes incorrectly claimed to imprison vampires and exploring the extraordinary cases in which the dead appeared to resist death itself.

Some of the stories will be folklore, some will be archaeology, some will be misunderstandings. And occasionally the truth will turn out to be considerably stranger than the supernatural explanation. Because humanity has spent thousands of years worrying about what happens after we die, but every now and again, we’ve been even more worried about what happens if we come back.

Welcome to The Dead Don’t Rest Week.

Please keep your hands inside the graveyard at all times.