Fact meets Fiction

In the category of current events - I read this short piece in our local newspaper this morning and smiled knowing that my mother would get a kick out of reading this article. Our ancestry on her maternal side comes from the historic region of Transylvania located in Romania. She loves to point this out whenever our nocturnal activities come to her attention. Needless to say, my mother enjoys old-fashioned horror flicks, and Friday the 13th is a holiday for her.

'Vampire Unearthed in Italy' was the eye-catching title of the short article. Taken from "News Services" reports : An archaeological dig near Venice has unearthed the 16th-century remains of a woman with a brick between her jaws - evidence that she was believed to be a vampire. This unusual burial suggests the legend of bloodsucking creatures was tied to medieval ignorance of how diseases were spread and what happens to bodies after death. Considered to be a "shroud-eater" the brick was forced into the corpse's mouth causing the so called vampire to starve to death and thus preventing the vampire from increasing it's numbers - such superstitions were a way of explaining the waves of plague epidemics that killed millions during the Middle Ages.

".....That ought to do the trick....."
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