this channel is part of the history hit network stick around to find out more grotesquely violated skeletons discovered recently in ireland have thrown new light onto our ever-growing obsession with vampires and our fear of the undead this burial was very obviously treated in a violent and aggressive fashion this is probably the most extraordinary deviant burial i've ever seen i think the message is still the same it's a very determined attempt to keep this person down [Music] archaeologists are now investigating why these bodies were subjected to such violence the answer may lie in horrors that have haunted us for centuries milo 25 years old also showing signs of the condition of vampirism mentioned there was this intense fear of vampires and revenants people coming back from the dead and haunting the living they were basically corrupting corpses that had kind of escaped from their graves and wandered about the irish skeletons can help us understand our ancient terror of the undead and even where it comes from to explain these shocking burials archaeologists must unlock clues from mysterious medieval texts and harness modern forensic technology the story will even take us to a terrifying 21st century case in romania buena [Music] [Music] the mountains and lakes of western ireland have long been seen as a land of mystery haunted by fairies and magic in 2004 archaeologists began an excavation in a little-known area called giltitian that would open a window onto our darkest fears they were searching for a medieval bishop's palace dating from the 12th century chris reed is one of the directors of the project when we started excavating we were hoping or anticipating that this was possibly the location of this bishop's palace and we were we couldn't have been more wrong they began to excavate underneath the flagstones of a ruined building near the lost palace if you love history then you'll love history hit we have tons of exclusive documentaries about the most important people in history that you will not find anywhere else from uncovering ancient neolithic cultures to the dawn of the space race history hit has hundreds of exclusive documentaries with unrivaled access to the world's best historians we're committed to bringing history fans award-winning documentaries and podcasts that you cannot find anywhere else sign up now for a 14-day free trial and timeline fans get 50 off their first three months just be sure to use the code timeline at checkout when we lifted up the stones themselves in here we literally had faces looking back at us which had been crushed flat by the floor indicating that whoever built this building at whatever time period knew that they were building directly on top of human remains which is quite a a dark and gloomy kind of thing to do within this quite small area literally about three meters by three meters we excavated somewhere between 30 and 40 skeletons literally stacked one on top of another in quite shallow graves this was just one of a series of remarkable discoveries the team made more cuttings into a raised burial platform in the field each was filled with bodies based upon where these cuttings are actually located the density of burials and their depth and if we sort of assume that they're all the areas in between are similarly filled with burials we're probably looking at a total burial population of between 2500 and 3000 people which makes it a very very very substantial cemetery late one morning chris was called over to see a new skeleton emerging from the earth this skeleton in particular was clearly treated in a very violent and aggressive fashion visually it's quite striking particularly the legs the way they've been twisted and bent back up around the stone it's really disturbing and it's also shocking as well but it also makes it very interesting it seems that this large boulder was deliberately placed in the grave to deform the skeleton professor mark horton has excavated hundreds of medieval burials and he is astonished by the find i've never seen anything so extraordinary you could actually do this naturally it's as if this person has been broken into many bits and they're bound together into a great bundle of flesh that the spinal column would have come around here round underneath the chest back round and then the pelvis must have been here it's almost as if they'd broken the body up bound it in such a way that it couldn't possibly ever come back to life again in my entire archaeological career i've never ever seen anything quite like it as they dug further down into the layers of burials there were more remarkable finds on archaeological sites the best part of the excavation is when somebody shouts out loud i found something you know everybody come look and as the skeleton was being uncovered it was very very clear that yeah there was this large stone stuck in the mouth visually it's a very dramatic sort of image none of the team had ever found anything like it before but then there was another discovery you always expect to find something unexpected on an excavation but then when we found a second one and in the exact same area we knew we had something that was special [Music] but why were these bodies treated with such violence after they were already dead the archaeologists removed the three skeletons from the site along with more than a hundred other burials they took them back to the lab for further analysis as the skeletons were clean shocking evidence emerged about the deaths of some of those buried in the cemetery do you think these look like cut marks yeah definitely now that's a big big chop mark and then a smaller one parallel to it very very straight edge the cut marks suggest that some of the kilten bodies were killed by bladed weapons like swords or spears in that time in ireland you have multiple different kingships in the region each of them is vying for authority warfare is an almost an endemic part of society in these periods and the role of warriors comes through very strongly when we look at the the literature and the evidence that [Music] survives people were aware of the constant fear and aggression that could be part of their lives even in this violent age the mutilation of these bodies was extraordinary [Music] were the people who buried them afraid of what they might become strange burials in ireland are not the only ones that have been found they've also been discovered all over western europe skeletons weighed down with large boulders were excavated in the czech republic in the 1960s bizarre burials have also been found in england and for medieval burial in southwell were found nails not these actual ones but very similar ones those have been deliberately placed in the body so one was found through the right shoulder another one was in through the heart and another one to the left ankle almost as if they deliberately place them there to make sure that the body could never rise up again a number of burials have been excavated of people who have either had their heads cut off or been placed face down or had the legs tied or be mutilated in various other ways there's even one that's got a spear thrust through it archaeologists and historians are beginning to believe that there may be a very particular reason for these disturbing medieval burials i think the general explanation for this has to be that these are people who are seen as a threat they're going to go on walking around after they've died they're going to come out of their graves and the living have to keep them down could this explain the extraordinary caltechian skeletons with the rocks in their mouths were they treated as people who might return from the dead dr katrina mckenzie is an osteo-archaeologist specializing in bone analysis she will examine the skeletons for any clues that could explain why they were buried so violently the thing that interests me most is that when you look at the skeleton you're looking at an actual human being who lived and died long ago and you're looking almost directly into the past it's always really exciting when there is something unusual about the skeleton or about the very opposition because you just can't help but wonder what it was that happened in this person's life that meant that they were buried in a different manner katrina has reassembled one of the skeletons with the stone found in its jaws [Music] this individual is a male individual it's a young adult which is probably between 30 to 35 years of age these bare bones can give us a glimpse of what this man might have been like he was quite a muscular individual he's got quite prominent muscle markings on his skeleton which shows that he was quite physically active during his life but it is the stone that intrigues her this is the stone which was forced into the jaws of burial 102 as you can see it's it's quite large and it's quite heavy as well it's triangular in shape yeah i've not seen anything quite like this before in in my own experience could the skull itself reveal any further clues about why the body was treated so violently [Music] when it was recovered from the earth it was already in an extremely fragile state as the team cleaned and prepared it for analysis they began to realize the extent of the damage do you think there's any chance of the skull actually being pieced back together i don't think it's going to be possible for us to reconstruct it more than i already have the facial bones were very crushed when they were in the ground and so i literally have hundreds of tiny fragments of mostly facial bones which um it would be near impossible to piece it all back together the past is not going to unlock its secrets easily for the kiltian archaeologists centuries of farming on the land may well have damaged the skull but even graveyards that haven't been farmed or built on can yield skeletons in strange positions at barclay in gloucestershire another cemetery is under excavation project leader professor mark horton knows how easily bodies can shift from the position in which they were buried this is a fairly normal early medieval burial you can see the bones are in the ground the arm bone the skull and so forth we've just finally we're cleaning it up at the moment but how our body reaches this position is quite a complicated process some bodies literally blow up underground as the gases are generated and it's in a confined space and you know stories of people walking around church yards and you hear them going pop pop as these bodies are exploding bones can go everywhere if you like in fact here you can see probably the skull wasn't laid in that position might have fallen over into that position so when people discover bodies in the ground they can be in all sorts of extraordinary positions they're not necessarily how they've been laid down so could this explain the strange burials of kilten could the stones in the jaws somehow have slipped in there by accident as the result of violent contortions during decomposition chris reed is convinced this is not the explanation it was very obviously intentional this is not a stone which rolled into the mouth after the burial process had been completed or through later disturbance um it could only have gotten there if it was put in quite forcefully the burials with the stones and the mouths are very interesting because they're they're large boulders and they look like they've been pushed in with with some force into the dead body and it suggests that they're trying to block the mouth and that could be to stop a soul having left the dead body from from re-entering into it and reanimating that body so it could rise from the dead there is another feature of the kiltetian burials which confirms that they were entirely deliberate the bodies were discovered right on the edge of the cemetery as if they were exiled from the other graves [Music] we had picked up the edges of a shallow ditch here in the cutting and it's within this ditch that we actually found are the first of our two stone and mouth skeletons so it was sort of lying out on on this axis which is not quite east west but north northwest southeast um and the body would have been lying this way with its feet slightly raised because on one side of the ditch and the head slightly raised at this side looking in this direction with the stone in the mouth [Music] archaeologists use a special term for these strange burials in ireland and elsewhere they call them deviant burials deviant means abnormal anything that's particularly strange or uncharacteristic not what you would expect from a christian burial in this period the christian faith had a well-established canon of beliefs you don't take objects with you when the world ends everyone will rise from their grave and face the rising sun so that burials are orientated east to west and because this was such a matter of conformity i think when there's a deviation away from that expected pattern it suggests some deliberate thought process has gone behind why you are doing something so abnormal all the evidence suggests that the deviant cultian burials were treated as if the dead might return from the grave and become the medieval equivalent of vampires [Music] today vampires have become entertainment but in the 12th century they were frighteningly real the medieval mind lived in a world of monsters and dragons they believed in supernatural events so the notion that the body would could come back and be reanimated wasn't that strange but actually the ideas were very much fostered by the church because when the cell left the body went to a place called purgatory and if the soul the person had left a particularly evil life that soul will be tortured in the most horrendous fashion and so the notion that it would escape from purgatory and come back to haunt the earth was a very powerful idea [Music] chronicles and histories from the period recorded terrifying stories about the undead as if they were true historian john blair has come to saint peter's church in stapen hill near burton on trent he's on the trail of a particularly chilling account which demonstrates the reality of this fear the extraordinary story of the stapan hill vampires begins when two peasants on burton abbey territory are poached by a lord nearby and he persuades them to move to the village of dracula which is just down the road the story is set in 1085 when the peasants were moving to a thriving community of several hundred people but soon their fortunes changed they come to a very nasty end because they die suddenly while they're eating and they're buried here in this church are behind me the next night they're seen walking around sometimes in the form of men with coffins on their backs and sometimes in the form of animals this must have been enormously frightening to these people who clearly thought that they were confronted really with the living dead historians call those who returned from the grave revenants in medieval times it was believed they had terrifying powers to make animals and people fall sick and even die we get quite vivid accounts in the 12th century about revenants and they are often returning to the place where they lived and they are often waking up their neighbors at night and telling them to come out or calling people they know by name and then these people will mysteriously die of some plague in the few days after the villages of drachlo had no doubt that they were confronting the evil dead everybody got so frightened that they moved away and soon the village was almost deserted the villagers got very worried about this and they got permission from the bishop to dig the two peasants up they found that the bodies were uncorrupt but the cloths over their faces were stained with blood the villagers were terrified they took the bodies from their coffins and beheaded them [Music] then they cut open the corpses and tore out their hearts [Music] they carried the hearts quite a long way probably to this hilltop we're on now it's not quite certain but it's likely that it was this place which was later a beacon for warnings and signals and may have been a place for executing criminals [Music] the dead villagers were treated as if they were still alive they were executed as punishment for crimes they had committed after their deaths [Music] it is said the two black crows rose and flew out of the smoke from the burning hearts [Music] the thin veil between life and death could easily be crossed some were so fearful of returning as a revenant that they left detailed instructions on how to avoid it one of the very best descriptions we've got of the practice of revenant in the middle ages comes from here from barclay in gloucestershire it's told by william of marmsbury one of the most reliable of the medieval chroniclers writing in the 12th century and he describes a witch living here in the nunnery in the 1060s who was so worried that her body was going to be reanimated after her death that she left very specific instructions that when she died she should be sewn up in a stag skin placed in a stone sarcophagus and then that should then be wrapped around with three massive sets of chains and locks and buried in the ground but what actually happened was that the body was placed in the ground and everyone did incantations for three days but even that didn't stop the devil according to the story came in a black horse dug up the body broke the chains of sunderland took the witch away to haunt this place forever after there are many other stories about the undead recorded by priests and chroniclers in the 12th century could the deviant kilten burials date from the same time as these extraordinary stories the irish team are going to carbon date the two skeletons to find out samples will be sent off for analysis to discover just when these people died these ancient beliefs in the undead have survived in literature and folklore for centuries even today in parts of central europe people guard against the possibility of the dead rising from the grave [Music] modern archaeology is reinforcing the reality of these fears as it reveals burials in which bodies have been staked chained and weighed down with heavy stones but how did this fear evolve into what we recognize as the vampire the blood-sucking creature that stalks our tv screens and our nightmares how did a folk terror become a modern fascination in december 1732 a team of austrian military doctors was sent to investigate a disturbing series of deaths in a serbian village then part of the austro-hungarian empire the doctors were led by a senior surgeon called johannes fluckinger a woman by the name of star would have been a highly trained surgeon for the period military surgeons were the best surgeons you could have they were working at a very fast pace they had more patients than any other surgeons could ever see and they had to operate quickly and efficiently so the training you would have had as a military surgeon would have been extremely high the villagers claimed that 17 people had died suddenly over a three-month period and that many of them had become vampires she is quite complete and undecayed fluckinger meticulously recorded his observations in this new age of science he thought that the villagers beliefs belonged to the medieval past she had herself said before her death that she painted herself with the blood of a vampire wherefore both she and her child who died right after birth must also become vampires fluckinger's main mission would have been to quash any idea that vampires were real and also to get to the bottom of what exactly was going on one of the big concerns would have been for the authorities was there an epidemic of some sort but as the coffins were opened one by one flucking his observations became more disturbing what he would have noted when he went inside the body was only four of them were decomposing naturally or what he assumed was natural the new nails are evident along with fresh and vivid skin all of these things didn't seem to be consistent with how he thought bodies should be decomposing upon the opening of the body there was revealed a quantity of fresh extravascular blood what the doctors were seeing contradicted their medical training not as is usual filled with coagulated blood modern medicine would recognize that these symptoms of vampirism were simply the normal process of decomposition milo 25 years old bodies can seem to be plump and healthy because of gases swelling up in the dead tissue by the name of melitza blood stains around the mouth are the result of stomach fluids leaking out she also was in a state of vampirism [Music] none of these bodies had been buried for more than three months and that means that the first body would have been buried in september allowing for a cold autumn it's easy to imagine that the body would have stayed relatively well preserved [Music] fluckinger's report into the vampire corpses was sent back to belgrade and was seized on by the newspapers the story exploded across europe fascinating thousands of readers and causing terror in many more this report got picked up by other sources in particular by newspapers um which were read by other people in europe the intelligencer of europe and it kind of spread not just in serbia not just in the austro-hungarian empire but eventually all through western europe serbian reports of vampire although they were localized generated an extremely high level of fear i think you could compare them best to modern rumor panics where you get a kind of anomalous event which is then linked on to kind of fears which are already in the population but it's very very intense very very real and this is really what happened in serbia in villages across central europe a vampire hunt began [Music] graves of the recently deceased were opened and the corpses were beheaded and often burnt were the same scenes played out in medieval ireland when the deviant burials were placed in their graves were these bodies feared as vampires [Music] the terrifying tales from eastern europe inspired a series of best-selling novels that would take the vampire myth to the next level [Music] the vampire comes into european folklore in literature at the beginning of the 19th century just very at the beginning and again it's through these translations of these descriptions of the 18th century and the first time we really see it is dr polidori who is writing along with byron and mary shelley at this wonderful sort of summer camp in switzerland and he takes this notion of the vampire and kind of turns it into the byronic hero he was actually thinking of lord byron so this is the first major change what had been really scary foul vampires become really attractive dangerous aristocrats in 1898 bram stoker transformed the idea of the dangerous dead into the sophisticated predatory vampire at the heart of so much film and fiction come inside and experience the dracula story was set partly in the gothic ruins of whitby abbey which stoker explored during his holidays on the yorkshire coast he chose whitby as the landing place for dracula when the evil camp first arrives in england [Music] stoker's sources were exactly these 18th century panics and these had been written up published and translated and by the time stoker was writing um people were going to eastern europe the tourist industry was was well and truly established and stoker really knew about this kind of strange edge of europe the superstitions that stoke are harnessed in writing dracula are still alive in the 21st century in parts of central europe fear of the undead remains chillingly real [Music] in martino de seuss a small village in southern romania relatives take care to seal fresh graves by circling around them with incense villagers but sometimes the ritual precautions aren't enough in 2004 five men went to the village cemetery to exhume the corpse of a man called petratoma who had died recently thomas niece mirella marineski claimed he had become a moroi a romanian word for the undead so her husband asked farmer yonyansku limitations [Music] it's chillingly similar to the story of the stapan hill vampires in england recorded almost a thousand years ago the villagers were going to destroy the moroi by cutting out the dead man's heart on the first night they couldn't find it so they went back a second time this time they succeeded they collected straw and dried corn husks to make a fire she actually rescued [Music] [Music] daughter complained about the desecration of her father's body the story went global [Music] even for romanians who are born in towns who don't know these practices when the whole story pumped out in the media it was a very very bad feeling that it was a scandal look here how primitive we can be how come so what will say the strangers europeans when hearing this kind of primitive practices [Music] the police were asked to investigate the desecration of petra thomas corpse but in most cases these strange rituals are not reported to the authorities or anyone else in such remote and isolated villages like marutino is with people very old living in in the community such rituals are very well preserved and they are carried out in order to to let's say protect somehow the the community uh from such events like returning from dead can be so you can still find it in in remote rural communities not only in romania but in the whole balkan area for example in serbia or in bulgaria where it's something that people still do the beliefs in 21st century romania seem identical to the fears in medieval england almost a thousand years ago it is quite amazing the level of continuity that we can see in these beliefs in europe across a very broad time span and i think it shows that you know people feel not everything can be explained rationally there is still space even in modern society for fear and superstition this deep-seated terror of the undead has lasted at least a thousand years from the middle ages to the present day but could its roots in ireland be even older [Music] the archaeologists investigating the deviant burials found at kilten are waiting for the results of carbon 14 dates which will tell them when these individuals died [Music] chris reed is on his way to the lab to get the results it's one of the treats for us archaeologists to actually get a date back because i i suppose more than any other sort of bit of analysis it allows us to do what we're supposed to do which is put the site in some kind of chronological order my own feelings is that it's early rather than later medieval somewhere in the eighth ninth century uh that would be that would be what i would be thinking and i like being right so i hope that's what it is it will be remarkable if chris can trace this fear of the vampire dead back several centuries before the earliest medieval accounts two weeks after the samples were taken from the deviant burials the carbon 14 dates are now in the results were actually emailed to me last night um from the company in miami and i'm just gonna have a look here right okay uh it looks like both of the burials um date to anywhere from the late 7th century to the 9th century and both of the dates seem to overlap in the middle of middle of the 8th century so anywhere from about 720 to 7 7 50 760. so the irish skeletons with the stones in their mouths were buried at least 300 years before the stories of the undead in england [Music] remarkably there are records from the same period suggesting that the fear of revenants and vampires was common one of the fascinating things about the dating of those burials is that they fit very well with the irish penitential texts that were written in that period so we've got one of these penitential texts from probably the seventh or eighth centuries it's called the first synod of st patrick and one of the things it describes in there is about um the fear of of the living dead so it says that anybody who believes in vampires should be put outside the church what that actually shows was that there was a lot of people who believed in something like vampires in ireland this is a fascinating example of where you've got archaeology matching up very well with our historical sources [Music] but why would this fear have been so powerful in this period john blair believes that the arrival of christianity may have triggered a wave of phobia anthropologists have shown that when old established belief systems get disrupted by the appearance of monotheism by by christianity or islam or buddhism that very often they can take curious forms now an obvious possible context for that would be seventh century england with the conversion of the kings and then the kingdoms to christianity between about 600 and about 660. and he's very interesting that a lot of the deviant burials come from that period and so it may be that a heightened sense of fear at certain categories of people who may be seen to be a threat after their deaths is something that comes when christianity undercuts the old beliefs and people are unsure what they should believe in those fears seem to have driven people to treat the kilten skeletons with extreme brutality [Music] in the same way in modern romania cutting the heart out from a dead relative might seem to be a barbaric act but there is another way of understanding these rituals in romania they are seen as helping them a roy [Music] a dad has to be dead not undead or half dead so they are doing him an uh something good not something bad so it's about uh universe cosmic harmony so the dead with the dead the life of the life so for the community is very good for the dead is very good so where is the harm for them slaying a moroi stops him from being trapped between this world and the next it literally saves him from a fate worse than death the main difference between the moroy and the vampire is that the vampire would kill to to be sure that he would live ever after let's say the strigoi or the moro in in the romanian traditional culture do nothing else but signal that something is wrong with him and he need to need assistance from the community to properly integrate it into the other world [Music] [Music] it's extraordinary how this modern folklore could be the key to understanding a deep-rooted fear that can never be explained by archaeology and science alone archaeologists always have been very reluctant to use folklore for folkloric traditions as a way of explaining ideas in the past i think while they may have been reinvented in the 17th 18th 19th centuries can we really get into the medieval mind and i think there's often a lot of truth behind these folklore stories i'm sure that as more examples are published archaeologists will become sensitized that actually when they find stones in burials or they find nails in aberrant places and so forth they all begin to say ah maybe that's a revenant burial and publish it and so hopefully as awareness increases so we'll begin to recognize that actually wasn't a very rare thing but actually really quite common in the middle ages for archaeologist chris reed the deviant burials have enriched his understanding of ireland's mysterious medieval past the stone and mouth skeletons when they were first discovered none of us really understood the potential importance of the more significance in in the wider scheme but as time has gone on we've all realized just how special they actually are and how unique within an irish context [Music] farmer john burke owns the land at kilten where the skeletons were found he believes that whatever the reasons for these strange burials the bodies should now be returned to their graves and left to rest in peace it's a strange thing but my dad would always have said this was a very peaceful place for me it's a sacred place and it will always be a sacred place with no particular fear or thoughts or otherwise and in a way i feel almost um in a way responsible or a duty bound to respect the people who are buried there they those people they weren't brought from anywhere else they're the local people's ancestors and i respect that and i think we're privileged to have this kind of sight on our land [Music] you