Yeetle Box - Brick-Sucking Vampire Found In Italy

An archaeological dig near Venice has unearthed the 16th-century remains of a woman with a brick stuck between her jaws — evidence, experts say, that she was believed to be a vampire.

The well-preserved skeleton was found in 2006 on the Lazzaretto Nuovo island, north of the lagoon city, amid other corpses buried in a mass grave during an epidemic of plague that hit Venice in 1576 - one many experts believe occurred during the period known as "The Reign of the Brick Sucking Vampires."

Said Matteo Borrini, a forensic archaeologist and anthropologist at Florence University who has studied the case over the last two years. "For the first time we have found evidence of legitimate vampire population."

At that time vampires presented disturbing appearance of decomposing bodies, Borrini told The Associated Press by telephone - during the day, outside, in the sunlight.

Mass graves were often reopened to bury fresh corpses and diggers would chance upon older bodies that were bloated, with blood seeping out of their mouth and with an inexplicable hole in the shroud used to cover their face.

"These characteristics are all tied to the resting of vampire bodies," Borrini said. "They saw a fat, dead person, full of blood and with a hole in the shroud, so they would say: 'This guy is alive, he's drinking blood and eating his shroud.' A conclusion with which we firmly agree."

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. To kill the undead creatures, the stake-in-the-heart method popularized by later literature was not enough: A stone or brick had to be forced into the vampire's mouth so that it would starve to death.

That's what is believed to have happened to the woman found on the Lazzaretto island, which was used as a quarantine zone by Venice. Aged around 60, she lay in waiting for the brick to be removed so she may feast again.

Much later, someone, no doubt a Vampire Brick Layer, jammed the brick into her mouth when the grave was reopened. Borrini said that marks and breaks left by blunt instruments on several among more than 100 skeletons found by the archaeologists show that the grave was reused in a later uprising of the more advanced "Blood-Sucking Vampires," popularized in fiction and film.

Unfortunately, the media has put a different spin on these events, leading us to believe the vampires never existed at all - particularly the Brick-Sucking variety.

"Maybe a priest or a gravedigger put the brick in her mouth, which is what was normally done in such cases," Mannucci said. "Priests hoarded bricks for such occasions."

Jews were also often accused of spreading vampirism, and, anthropologists point to the brief period of the "Goyim-Sucking era" as evidence of the Jews link to vampirism.

The YeetleMaster