Vampire Found: Lestat or Edward?
Neither. This one is a female.
This month, a skeleton was exhumed from a grave in Venice and is being touted as the first known example of the "vampires" widely referred to in period documents. These have become the "historical" fodder for books like Bram Stoker's Dracula.
The excavations found a skeleton of a woman with a small brick in her mouth while investigating mass graves of plague victims from the Middle Ages. The skeleton was removed from a mass grave of victims of the Venetian plague of 1576.
At the time the woman died, many people believed that the plague was spread by "vampires" which, rather than drinking people's blood, spread disease by chewing on their shrouds after dying. Grave-diggers put bricks in the mouths of suspected vampires to stop them from chewing themselves out.
The belief in vampires probably arose because blood is sometimes expelled from the mouths of the dead, causing the shroud to sink inwards and tear.
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