Talking With the Dead: Part 2

Until the early 19th century, Venetians usually buried their dead under paving stones within the central city: not a salutary practice, particularly in times of pestilence. So the Austrian government-in-occupation decreed in 1837 that San Michele would be the only possible burial ground for most Venetians. There are much older graveyards though: the 14th Century Jewish burial ground on the Lido, the hospital cemeteries and the communal plague pits on the Lazzaretti islands.

From one of these comes the virally dispersed story of the skeleton that couldn’t talk at all. Matteo Borrini, of the University of Florence, found the skeleton of a woman with a small brick in her mouth while excavating mass graves of victims of the Venetian plague of 1576 buried on Lazzaretto Nuovo. There is evidence to suggest some people In the Middle Ages believed that the plague was spread by ‘vampires’ which, rather than drinking people’s blood, spread disease by chewing on their shrouds after dying. Gravediggers put bricks in the mouths of suspected vampires to stop them doing this. 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. The Wichita State University in Kansas found similar skeletons in Poland.