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Back in the days people would dig up bodies from their graves to identify vampires. Thing is, when a body is in the process of decomposing it shows all these signs they considered to be the living dead.

Dead bodies swell up due to the acids and liquids acting up inside the body, trying to condense---back in the day they thought bodies who had these signs were freshly fed.

Dead bodies leak blood through holes in their bodies as the gases and acids push them up (like burping and such except this time youre dead so u cant do anything except leak stuff out)...----back in the day people thought they had just bitten someone and were full of blood.

Dead bodies shrivel up due to the fact that the water in the body dries up...our bodies are mostly made up of water...so the nails look like they are growing, and the hair looks like its growing, when infact is the skin that is shriveling back and exposing these materials in our bodies...

These are just some examples that the 'living dead' posses according to people back then. Bodies were dug up from their grave during this process and people thought they were decomposed, when in fact they were very much dead.

Just little facts and stuff I thought Id share ;)

happy Halloween!

Very interesting darkness... and wonderfully graphic in words...

...glad I wasn't eating lunch when I read that....

So what you're saying, or what I'm reading from this is, much a similar thought as we have stated in other threads...

...people who don't understand make assumptions... and these assuptions are often based in their fears, superstitions and beliefs...

Or so I'm reading into this...

You are correct. Fear makes the mind wonder and create fantasies which are rich in detail and false. If one rich crazy noble can get other rich crazy nobles to believe what he thinks...then we have a social outburst of assumptions and rumors believed by the majority of the public.

Some might disagree...but hey, look at mythology and all its made of; cyclops, dragons, etc...do you believe those to be true? They are nice stories...but thats about it...and people believed those legends to be true back then because they didnt know any better and needed an explanation for it.

Today, science is our explanation & we believe it...doesnt mean its true ;)

yep, I am very familiar with this matter, has been alllll over tv lately. heh some blood coming out of a dead mans mouth OF COURSE must mean he has recently fed. *sigh*

hehehe graphically done, my dear :) I like graphic descriptions....

and then there were people that were dug up and when they did not show the signs of decomposition as they should, then superstition would run rampant! Depending on how the person died, the soil and how they were buried or preserved first came into play in the body's decomp process...I've read where superstition went into overdrive when some people were dug up on purpose or accidently and found NOT to be as bad off as they should and then the stake in the heart or then burning the body to make sure the person was, in fact, deader than a doornail and stayed that way.

oh, also...
That brings up another point (sorry if I go off topic here for a bit). I was also watching the H channel and this thing came on that some people back in the day were buried alive without knowing and some instead of suffocating in their tombs were able to rise from the ground. I think this brought about the walking dead subject....it started with the case of John Spalding, I think was his name, please correct me if Im wrong....he freaked out a lot of people and so the rumors and stories began...
Apparently he was killed, but not quite. While in shock he rose from the grave and started walking around town, suffocating and having respiratory issues....yeah...I would've freaked out too if I saw someone walking around who I just buried hours ago.

Tuberculosis was also rampant and deadly back then. People who sucumbed to it were even more likely to display signs
and symptoms through their corpses associated with vampirism.

and to stay off topic just a wee bit... it was quite the mad fad in Victorian England for being buried with a bell and cord, especially in tombs....in fact, Edgar Allen Poe wrote that into a story of his... but that was quite a concern for many years - being terrified of being buried alive.

Yes, that indeed was popular. Almost forgot about that. That observation fits pretty well into the topic.

that bell thing is the origin of the term graveyard shift, the night watchman would sit out in the yard ready to start digging should someone awaken and start ringing a bell

I agree with what has been mentioned above. The masses were full of fear, which made it easy to point the finger, and blame some supernatural event. But it is often so. Man is smart.. it is the masses tha t are ignorant.

Exactly Katrina... nothing is more dangerous than mass ignorance following what they are lead to believe...

Odds are, the person doing the leading isn't doing it for noble purposes...

Finding order in chaos, we do it today when we see "faces" in particles of dust in a photo. We have that trait for a reason, but it seems to make fools of us more often than not.

I believe I read where the fear of being buried alive in the Victorian age was sometimes justified. There was a cementary where several graves were opened and inside the coffins were scratches from the people who had awoken inside and tried to get out before suffocating there. I must admit this is a fear that is still around today as I've heard people still mention it as something they are afraid of "Make darn sure I'm dead before they bury me." I guess some fears we just don't outgrow.

yep. Those stories are absolutely true. And knowing what we know now, it takes some of the horror put of those stories and replaces it with a kind perhaps even worse.

Yeah, they better make sure I'm dead before the toss my body over-board for fish food.

Oh yeah, by the way, the traditional funeral thing isn't for me...

As a note to this lack of understanding... I'm sure everyone has read the interesting fact as to why we have wakes... to make sure the person is actually dead before burying. And the "wake" was often held in the "parlor" room of the house (for the wealthier) hence the term Funeral Parlor... but when actual buildings and businesses started coming to be to take care of these funerals, people started to refer to their parlors as Living Rooms to get rid of the death connotation....

And the frequency in past times that people would suffer lead poisoning from eating acidic foods - usually tomatos - off of pewter plates. The lead poisoning would cause them to slip into a coma from which they often awakened, but many were buried as they were assumed dead.

This also lead (no pun intended) them to believe tomatos were poisonous when in actuality it was their poor choice of dinnerware...

...too bad Martha Stewart wasn't around back then to teach them how to set a proper table...

Indeed very good DB :)

And her are the stages listed for you all.

THE STAGES OF DECOMPOSITION:

STAGE 1:

Muscles relax
Body cools (algor mortis)
Rigor mortis sets in (for 1 to 2 days)
Skin begins to shrink and retract

STAGE 2:

Internal decay begins as bacteria and parasitres become active
If present, flies will lay eggs or deposit larvae in orfices
Flesh begins to liquidize under the skin
Skin slews off easily
Maggot begin to migrate
Gases cause the stomach to distend
Dark bloody flouid discharges from the orfices
Trunk swells to almost twice its original size

STAGE 3:

Skin turns black and begins to break, deflating the corpse and releasing foul smelling gases
Decomposition coninues until only the skeleton remains.

yup. decomposition...so much fun to study =)

especially the part where i come in and get to perform and autopsy on maggot rotten smelly corpses with so much rigor mortis that they are stiff like a rock, unrecognizable ,and the smell can be felt 2 miles away from the decomp. room patio.


now, if one of those stiffies decides to grab my hand one day while im sawing them open....i dont know, i think ill prolly AMI right then and there. And yes, theres not a day that goes by that I dont think about that everytime I go through the doors of the Rayder Trauma Center.

yay, i love my internships :)

heres some advice DB "hit them in the head"
all the zombie movies agree...>;-P

While we're on the subject of being buried alive, anyone remember this:



It was based on a book by Wade Davis who claims that it's inspired of personal experience. He went to Haiti to find the poisons and chemicals that were used by the houngans to 'create' zombies. He felt they'd have medicinal value.

The idea was that a person was so completely immobilized by the drug used that even a doctor would think you dead...but you'd be totally conscious and aware of your surroundings. You'd be buried, go mad, and be dug up later by the houngan as a mindless servant. Even Wade Davis felt that there was a spiritual or metaphysical aspect to it as well but the idea was at least predominantly based on the madness of being buried alive and conscious.

Now that you touch upon this, a long time ago I started a thread on Zombies that was about this same subject. I dont know if anyone remembers...it was wayyy back in the way. IT was a very good thread and subject.

Ya, that is interesting... I did a little body decomposition studing a while back and there was some stuff refered about that... I personally wouldn't like to dig up a decomposing body... it would smell horroble...

And I was going to order transcripts of the "Vampire Mysteries" show on the History Channel. Saved myself a few bucks, woot!

Wow... that's really interesting and somewhat discusting. But it all makes perfect sense. It just makes you wonder after digging up all those bodies that after seeing they all had these features people would stop thinking everyone was the 'living dead.'

But one question remains, "Where are the fangs?" :)

like i said, when corpses have advanced rigor mortis...when theyre stiff as a board, their skin starts to shrink up and that includes the gums on the mandibles....thats were the fangs come from, also the fact that some people's are larger than others....etc...

Also, sometimes when they staked the body, excess air was released from the lungs and made it sound as if the corpse was screaming, and on some occasions the action would also make the body squish up in one area, making it seem the cadaver struggled, leading the peasants to believe they had killed a vampire, when in fact they had only desecrate a tomb or grave.

Some people's what are larger than others? hehehe,

Sorry DB , just couldn'y help it. Good topic here. I think everthing has been covered. I can't find the info at the moment, but I believe I read some where that hair and nails do continue to grow post mortem. I can't confirm it so I'm off to do some research.

So I figured I share this interested dead body moment with everyone:

About 5 years ago when I was still working as a Paramedic I responded to a "check the welfare" call at an 82 man's apartment. When I arrives you could small dead body from the hallway. The Sherrif's dept let us in and I walked into the most foul smelling oven ever. We had a heat wave for about two weeks in the high 90's and this guy hadn't been heard from in about a week. There were flies buzzing around the apartment and all of the windows wers shut tight. I wlaked into the kitchen to fin an obese man in a wheel chair, body straight as if he was stretching, head way back, arms hangin at the side. His hands and feet were bloated, and the skin was balooning with sango-serous fluid (clear, pink stuff). His eyes were huge and bulging out of the sockets and had begun to leak leaving tear like trails of bloddy goo running down the side of his head over his ears, also leaking the same goo. His stomach contents had bubbled up and were overe flowing from his mouth and dripping to floor. His body was bloated and huge. Flies were busy doing what flies do buzzing around and feeding from the corpse. The Sherrif's deputy was gagging ran from the room. It was probably one of the grossest post mortem scenes I have been on. This guy looked positively monstrous and scary. My partner was a rookie and she freaked out. We left and I went and got some lunch.
Just thought I'd share.

Thank you Tego for sharing that with the rest of us on here, I am really happy I was not eating my dinner while reading that tid bit.

Yes, I knew a couple of interesting pieces that were brought up in this thread. For example, the bells on the coffin etc, can you imagine being buried alive?! I sure couldn't but, it did happen.

Interesting thread you had started here DB!

Thanks Demonia..

and Tony, you caught me eating my delicious dinner...i think i threw up in my mouth a little ;)

lol

Well to answer your question, the ears and hair dont keep growing after one is dead....its just an illusion created by the stretching of the skin as it turns stiff and the water that makes up the flesh evaporizes into the atmosphere...

FelixFelix, I do remember that Movie... It was Wickedly Awesome... This is a Kewl Thread... Interesting... I have a Friend thats a Mortician and I have learned a few things here and there, Lol... Creepy... I use to work in a Hospital... The worst thing for me that i have ever seen was a body of a woman who had died and been left in water in her apartment for several weeks... When it came time to take care of the body it was gross... Unrepairable beyond belief... As they rolled her from where she had died, Actual Chunks of Body Mass just fell off... Not to mention a few other things... And the Smell undescribeable... Her skin stuck to the sheet to top it all off, Of what was trying to be kep intack... It was an experience of a Lifetime and I will never forget it... Sorry didnt mean to get off the origonal subject but i justthought about it reading this... Wicked Kisses and Blessed Be, Darla...

Very well written dear. Is why I plan on being creamated.

Taphophobia- fear of being buried alive.Edgar Allen Poe was quite fascinated with this condition and wrote several of his stories based upon it.

That is some very new stuff! I really always believed the hair kept on growing, when in actual reality, the body is just dehydrating. Very cool. I feel so dumB~NFA

I have read this sort of thing happening many times. If people observed regular human decomposition processes and that information was common knowledge to the public, than no one would make a big deal out of dead people suspected of being vampires simply because they show these sighns. The fact is, most people don't want to be well informed on death.

That's pretty interesting ... but I read in somewhere, that even when you are dead, the body still have electric activity, this impulse make that things like hair or fingernails still grow up, for a while...
Even, I thing that something must be happen in those times, for the people dig out deadbodys, just to see if they are or not vampires...

I must say this was a very interesting read. I have also read that things such as hair and nails can still grow after death.

death, the dead, vampyres, cathalepsia , all seemingly related during the middle ages, and still in some archaic villages,

the myth of the vampyre arose in Europe as corpses rising from the grave to feed off the living , graves beign usurped , corpses beign burned and stabbed,
diseases related to vampyres, human nonsense, human superstition, influenced by their own ignorance.

All I have to say, fare thee well.

Lord Markus

Yet nobody is acknowledging the hundreds of eye witness accounts of the undead wandering beyond their earthly confines and other supernatural phenomena associated with vampires.

It could be a case of mistaken identity if all we are talking about are the various things that happen when we die and a corpse being thought to be a vampire when it is not. But what of the "corpse" that wanders during the night and attacks people sleeping in their beds?

I can remember growing up that there were a cope of relatives bodies laid out in the "parlor" at my Grandma's house. I was always afraid they were going to "sit up" like I had seen in movies.

apparantly in some cases, based on how the body responds to the mortis brothers, it does occur....the eyes come open, the mouth can open and even "sit up" in the coffin from the muscles contracting.

I could see how it would be a scary thing...I would be terrified.

i totally dont understand how primitive man even in these times could not distiguish if someone was dead or not, and before they bury them why dont they just smother them so they made sure they wont wake up? that would be creepy to be in a grave yard and have a bell ring then have to go and dig them back up,hehe

Interesting info.... But in the old times, the knowledge about life and death was very little... That's why they invented that bell if someone was buried alive by mistake... In some states of coma, the heart rate decreases very much, undetectable by the medical equipment of those times...

Ok so my friends grandfather died recently. I thought of this thread when it happend. We had seen him on wednesday of last week alive, and fully hydrated! We found him this evening when we went to check on him. He had already rigored, and he smelt really bad, and he looked like he was melting. They said the body had to have been there for more than 48 hours! Yikes:(!~NFA

What nice thread to read while drinking your favorite protine powder drink...lol..

Thank you for this information DB, it give a more clear view on the superstition people had with vampires, I guess it is the "see what you want to see" thing. Decomposition is always facinating.

Maybe on another note, people dug up dead bodies for their own weird (in lack of a better term) pleasure. Death and what happens to the bod has always facinated people.

one of the ways they used to tell if people were alive or not was to stick a mirror under their nose......to see if condensation appeared on the glass.

NFA that sounds horable. I have seen a body that had been dead for a short time but that affect of melting did not happen. I wonder why his had that affect. I do know that the smell is something that comes on rather quickly.

Vampirologist - You're right there were eyewitness accounts as well. "My recently deceased wife is haunting me and feeding on me" But how much weight do you put into an eyewitness account when it's based on a time period where faith in the supernatural trumped the very idea of logic.

If every eyewitness account of anything beyond the norm were taken at face value for the truth, we'd have to acknowledge goblins, dragons, ufos, vampires, ghosts, trolls, banshees, faeries, cyborgs, zombies, demons, angels, mermaids, harpy, giants, unicorns, minotaur, gorgons and more. Now I'm not saying that it wouldn't be a lovely fairy tale if it were all true but that would leave little room for regular old humans, wouldn't it?

Should a full examination be desired of the post-mortem examinations of the dead by unlearned peasants that led to most of the commonly held stereotypical vampire characteristics (blood-drinking, fangs, long fingernails, "undead", etc.) of the Middle Ages, I highly recommend:

Vampires, Burial, and Death: Folklore and Reality - Paul Barber

Very neat thanks for sharing.. The head stone was also used as to hold the body down as well.
If there was a head stone that wasn`t properly erect ,but had fallen over . The people thought it was yet another sign of Vampireisim..

This was done very well and I also remember E.A. POE being terrified of being buried alive Hell I know I would not want to be and the Serpent and the Rainbow was an awesome reality check movie. very interesting stuff here

the bodies fermentate and bacteria starts making gasses in decomposition. Yes I guess fermentation is an acidic process, but I guess what that means is the blood kinda turns into like tequila.

you did a wonderful discrption of facts ...... i love it .... i saw on the history channel to were they used to tie string on the corpses attached to bells because sometimes they would bury people alive .....so when they woke up and move the bell would ring and let them know they were alive.......makes you wonder how many of those poor people were accused of being vampires..... god could you imagen finally getting dug up cause you rang a bell only to be greeted with a stake through the heart......uggggg

It just amuses me slightly when Christians like monks and priests were exhumed and showed no signs of decomposton that they usually proclaimed them saints. Then with anyone else the proclaimed them vampires if they found a corpse with no signs of decomposition. I read somewhere if a person was poisoned with enough arsenic or cyanide, (I can't remember which.)That the corpse would remain preserved and in some times some of these undecomposed corpses could have been murder victims

yes and there are more facts.

after you are dead the air is pressed out your longs and that makes a sssszzzz sound. sometimes people heard that and believed too that it was a sign that the vampire is only sleeping and not dead.

ppl that werent burried in coffins but on stone plates inside mausoleums sometimes sit up as their muscles were contracting which was also a sign to ppl that these corspes were undead

I wasn't aware that they dug bodies up to see if they were vampires. This is an interesting post. I do like all of the scientific data that you included to talk about the actions of a dead body which explain the traits exhibited. This was a very good post. Thanks.

I could also see another way the walking dead theory gained acceptance. People on this post had mentioned the bell that people were buried with. Another person mentioned that she would start running if she heard a bell go off. If you combine the bell with fear of vampires, I could see them staking a person who was buried alive, mistaking them for a vampire.

okay not to sound like the stupid guy but you all got me confused. So if there is a scientific explantion for vampirism do they exsit or not?

Was actually watching a tv show about that on the history channel. They would even dig up there old relatives back in romania, and if the body was still perserved, they'd destroy it.

I too saw the show on the history channel on this topic. It was really interesting.

wow! that is actually really amazing.... it really interests me.... i shall have to do more research!

As per the words of the Wicked Witch, " I'm melting, melting, ahhhhh what a world"

good thing I'm not wicked..lol...well, then again..
the bell ringing is really creepy

im surprised my stomach allowed me to get to the end of this thread!

I have one rather stupid question... isn't ones hair and nails already dead? And if thats the case, didn't these people know that?

Yep, sign me up for cremation, too.

As an aside, I live in New Orleans and as many of you already know, thanks to the graphic coverage we received during Huricane Katrina, we are below sea level which presents interesting challenges for the handling of our dead. Most graves are actually small mausoleums which makes our cemeteries look like cities of the dead.

But here's where the fun begins...when we have storms, hurricanes or other serious weather anomalies, pressure can cause a phenomenon where a coffin literally is projected into the air like a missile until the contents come to rest again, generally spilled open and purty scarrrry. I had the great fortune of watching a newscaster during a storm where he was covering a cemetery while in a shallow bottom boat. He was whispering the news and looking around the whole time because he was so freaked.

After Katrina, we had coffins littering the streets who had simply floated down highways. Imagine before the information age...imagine how you might have explained such things that met your eyes. Even in this age, it's damned unsettling to see.

There are actual accounts of this: A white horse was left to run in a cemetary, and when the horse stopped on the grave, it was then exumed. The decompositional state of the body was then taken as signs of vamporism, and the head was removed and a wooden stake driven through the heart. thank goodness we evolved!

I have donated my body to "the body farm", founded by Dr. Bill Bass. I understand all that you have discussed here and have read many a book on these things. I really don't see how it fits in to vampirism...but, I love the topic just the same.

You know speaking of ignorance.. on a more comical look at this... it makes me think of how on Monty Pythons and the Holy Grail... the bit about the witch... where they say wood floats and witches are made of wood because they burn so witches must float. lol.

The misconceptions of long ago have caused many of problems . Like how if you had a mole or birthmark or freckle of any sort you were considered a witch and burned, or hanged. Its all really crazy.

I can not imagine being burried alive though. It would be indeed a strange thing to expieriance.

well considering this day and age with embalming i dont think we would have to worry about being burried alive......but back in those day and ages according to the history channel it wasnt to uncommon because they didnt have the medical knowledge we do tooday......and one can totally understand how back then they would think that the people burried alive could be vampires.......i ean yeah the bell was tied on those dead so if they were mistakenly burried alive people could rescue them ... but fear set in and then yeah they must be vampires so we will stake them and cut off there head when we dig them up........its sad really.......

lol it really makes you think about being cremated lol