However, in a dark corner of my PC, I opened a dusty computer folder marked "Ideas for blog" and it creaked slowly open as JPEG creepies and GIF crawlies scuttled out from it. And in it, under the failing light of my torch, I found terrifyingly what I am posting tonight.
It is a TV review I wrote much earlier this year. Usually I would not have kept it, but for it being fully written and ready to go, felt I should hold on to it for a little while.
At the time it didn't make it onto the blog simply because I figured nobody else was likely to have watched a Channel 5 documentary called: "Mysteries of the Vampire Skeletons". Of course, now, there is even less likelihood of someone remembering it.
However, in lieu of my GhostWatch viewing still to come, I felt it was apt on Halloween to resurrect it.
....
There is an unwritten rule in Archaeology: If you don’t know what you are looking at, say it is “ritual” and move on.
Often, describing things as “ritual” is unsatisfying for the couch historian. Far better to have archaeology provide unbendable proof of vampires. So fair play to Channel 5 who commissioned the documentary “Mysteries of the Vampire Skeletons”.
The documentary set out to explain the reason behind burials found on the outskirts of an Irish medieval cemetery where the skeletons are in positions suggesting they were somehow broken up and each found with a stone in their jaws.
As clear a case of “ritual” as there ever was. Only that would be too… well, Time Team and, son, you’re Channel 5’s boy now.
“Mysteries of the Vampire Skeletons” was everything you hope for in a commissioned channel 5 documentary.
At once full of conjecture and speculation given to no counter argument – one professor immediately makes some extraordinary leaps of faith about how the bodies have been placed: their bones broken after death – “in those deliberate conditions those bodies could not possibly rise out of their graves”.
Another makes a statement regarding the act of placing a stone in a body’s mouth, “Almost as if there is an intentional act to prevent the soul from re-entering and re-animating the body”.
Far be it for me to counter an academic or two but I would think that being dead is a rather more deliberate condition to not being able to rise out of their graves. And no matter that the stone thing may well have been a result of any number of beliefs surrounding the specific people who were dead [perhaps – just spitballing – the stones were placed to prevent the soul from leaving the body and reaching Heaven] you just carry on and suggest the one that sounds the most like it is a vampire skeleton.
I feel like we are being led somewhere here.
An archaeological osteologist is produced next and is shown putting the jigsaw of one of the bodies together. Standing over it, she adds nothing but says everything with: “I like doing this work because you start to realise that this is the body of someone who used to be alive.” And then goes on, “I have not seen anything like this act of putting a stone in the mouth of the dead before. And you can see that this stone is heavy. I cannot piece together the front of the skull because it has been broken into too many fragments.”
The documentary missed a trick here – they could have easily claimed to have digitally recreated the man from the broken skull shards, ala CSI, where the computer outputted this:
And hoped no one recognised him as Vampire Bill.
Finally, she looks a little lost in thought: “It all makes you think what it did to end up in such a way?” Does she mean laid out on a mortuary table in front of a woman who has no concept that I can’t see weight? Or, that it had sucked the blood of a maiden in it’s time?
Which leads me on to the point which, absurdly, annoyed me most of all – this isn’t vampirism is it? I mean, there are no fangs. This more fits the facets of being a Zombie.
Undeterred, the documentary continues with 3 tales (2 being historical reconstructions) of occasions where bodies have been exhumed and desecrated due to them being perceived to be un-dead. One is from the middle-ages where two recently buried men were reportedly seen walking through the cemetery as animals. The 2nd is about a study made by a doctor from the Georgian era. The third a story is from modern Romania about a farmer who exhumed the body of a woman’s uncle at her request to remove and burn his heart to prevent him haunting her dreams: “I saw that the body was fat, when I stuck my knife into her uncle he groaned and when I threw the heart onto the fire, it crackled.” For some reason the contemporary story seemed less quaint and more creepy. It was probably the laughing and smiling old gnarly farmer telling the story with palpable glee at getting away with burning a human heart he had just cut out a corpse that did it.
The documentary was pained to point out the relevance of the telling this stories. The beliefs that the dead can rise and stalk the living have been around for many years and so the proposed link was that it is possible that they spread to Medieval Ireland. The key was the age of the burials.
The cameras now follow the archaeologist managing the burial excavation. He is excitedly driving his car. “I am going to the research lab to get the results of the carbon dating of the bones!” Then a quick cut to his office where he renders the first part of the footage inexplicable and redundant: “I was actually sent the results in an e-mail.” He looks at the e-mail on screen – the camera slowly zooms in to his face and the screen, building tension, he points to some squiggly lines “We are looking at a crossover point of 740AD.”
Was this good or bad, it was impossible to tell. The narrator, thankfully, helps out: “This puts the graves some 300 years before the first recorded instance of a “vampire” burial. Could these graves be the earliest ever found of vampirism?”
No. There is no connection. There is no connection of time, of written or spoken history or religious tradition or of geography. None. No.
Academics giving half arguments, dubious evidence waved at the camera, weirdly drawn parallels from space and time and strange editing choices all geared toward the total narrative belief of the actual existence of vampires is a virtuoso channel 5 bit of fluff. Nonetheless, I simply don’t understand why these academics went onto this documentary, taking the wooden nickel, to give authority to this diluted historical nonsense. Perhaps it was ritual. Ritual humiliation.
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