It sounds like the title for a supernatural thriller, but actually this is a short video report on the BBC site about a team of scientists from Florence University who were excavating a mass burial site in the city dating from 1576, when the Plague decimated the powerful city-state of Venice, and found among the remains a woman’s skull with a brick placed in her mouth, believed to be a preventative move to stop her returning from the grave as a vampire after death.
Which might sound crazy, but European folklore is replete with stories of what could cause an ordinary person to become a vampire after death (and usually it was post-mortem, not like modern-era books and films where someone is ‘brought across’, the transformation would happen often some time after internment. Buffy is one of the few modern vamp series to flirt with that aspect of fokloric vampirism) and just how you could stop it happening, or at least stop them from rising again if they did become a vampire, using a brick, removing the head and placing it between the feet in the coffin, tying the legs together or leaving insoluble Sudoku puzzle books with a pencil inside the casket (okay, I might have invented the last one, but its no dafter than some of the real methods used for centuries by the superstitious).
March 15th, 2009 at 12:37 am
Joe, the Sudoku measure deserves its place in canon alongside garlic, crosses and running water.