Experts said the discovery supported the medieval belief that vampires were behind the spread of plagues like the Black Death.
The skeleton was unearthed in a mass grave from the Venetian plague of 1576 – in which the artist Titian died – on the small island of Lazzaretto Nuovo in the Venice lagoon.
The unusual burial is thought to be the result of an ancient vampire-slaying ritual. It suggests the legend of the mythical bloodsucking creatures was tied to medieval ignorance of how diseases spread and what happens to bodies after death.
The brick is thought to have been used to prevent the woman feeding on victims of a plague which swept through the city in the 16th Century.
Situated around two miles north east of Venice, the grave was used as a sanatorium for plague sufferers.
With hundreds of Venetians dying every day, gravediggers likely just misinterpreted the corpses they saw at varying levels of decomposition while reopening fresh mass graves.
Vampire superstition was already part of European culture by the time the bubonic plague reappeared on the continent in sporadic outbreaks throughout the late 1500s. The classic folkloric image of the undead, bloodsucking vampire likely originated in Eastern Europe and spread westwards, historians say, blending and morphing with local beliefs as it went.
“Vampires don’t exist, but studies show people at the time believed they did,” said Matteo Borrini, a forensic archaeologist and anthropologist at Florence University who studied the case over the last two years. “For the first time we have found evidence of an exorcism against a vampire.”
Modern forensic science shows the bloating is caused by a buildup of gases, while fluid seeping from the mouth is pushed up by decomposing organs, Borrini said. The shroud would have been consumed by bacteria found in the mouth area, he said.
At the time however, what passed for scientific texts taught that “shroud-eaters” were vampires who fed on the cloth and cast a spell that would spread the plague in order to increase their ranks.
The anthropologist, who did not take part in Borrini’s research, said that at a time when bacteria were unknown, such superstitions were a way for the terrified population to explain the waves of plague epidemics that killed millions during the Middle Ages. Jews were also often accused of spreading the disease.
Borrini said the discovery shows that vampires in popular culture were originally quite different from the elegant, aristocratic blood-drinker depicted in Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel “Dracula” and in countless Hollywood revisitations.
“The real vampire of tradition was different,” he said. “It was just a decomposing body.”
