Vampires in Venice

After sitting at my desk working away on my papers for the past couple of days, I decided to turn on the TV for a break thinking I'd watch a mindless comedy.  However, when I turned on the TV, a documentary by National Geographic was on about vampires in Venice.  The documentary focused on a skeleton of a woman who had a brick placed in her mouth.  Before this class I probably wouldn't have thought anything about this documentary, but after having discussed ideas of regarding interpretations of burials and vampires I put down the remote to hear what the show was discussing.

The focus of this documentary was on 16th century Venice, when life expectancy was about 40 years old.  With testing of the woman's canine tooth with a special xray machine the researchers found this skeleton to be somewhere between the ages of 61-71, twenty to thirty years older than the average person.  This led the researchers to ponder the idea that perhaps people thought this woman was a witch and not normal.  They also ran tests on her bones to determine what she ate.  Apparently one can find out what sort of food the deceased ate depending on trace chemicals found in bones.  These researchers found that this particular individual ate a primarily vegetarian diet (also finding that she was therefore lower class as she most-likely could not afford regular meat in her diet).  So since she was vegetarian she couldn't be a vampire right?!...

Well further investigations regarding the interpretations of vampires occurred.  Researchers found that during the time this individual was buried it was taboo to dig up graves of the deceased.  However, since this was during the time of the plague graves were often dug up to create mass burials for the victims of the plague.  When people saw the buried individuals queries arose.  The findings caused suspicion and interpretations that these corpse were vampires due to various findings as follows.  These buried individuals appeared to have long finger nails, more hair, skin that appeared to be cracked, bloated stomachs, as well as the linen placed on their faces the linen around the mouth had disintegrated and was peeled back.  As well, sometimes the buried moved!  What did all these things mean? To answer some of these questions further research was conducted.  As a corpse decomposes, skin begins to shrink causing finger nails and hair to appear longer since the skin has shrunk back.  The shrinking also causes the skin to look unusual.  As the internal organs decompose, the stomach can swell and and gases escape through the mouth causing the material around the mouth to rot away.  Movement of the corpse can be the cause of gases escaping or rodents etc.

Another interpretation as to why these corpse were considered vampires was that one symptom of the plague was blood coming out of the mouths of victims.  This blood could be interpreted as the consumption of blood.  Then when the buried corpse were found to move or display oddities,  more interpretations that these people were vampires arose.

So when these mass graves were uncovered to bury more people, items such as bricks were placed in the corpse mouths as means to keep them from doing anything a vampire might do.

Overall, I thought it was kinda neat to see something on TV that relates to the material we've covered in our class.  Furthermore, it was interesting how these researchers used the data and material at hand and how they gathered the interpretations.  They used the findings from the graves, written transcriptions, new technologies, etc and in the end reformed the skull putty to create a would-be 3D image of the woman's face.  

I found this webpage, by National Geographic News, that gives more information on this documentary.
And I also found this short clip of the end of the documentary.