Italian researchers think they've found what remains of a female "vampire" in a Venice plague pit. The body was buried with a brick jammed into its jaws so that she couldn't feed on plague victims of the Venetian plague of 1576 which claimed the life of the artist Titian. During that time it was believed that vampires spread plagues such as the Black Death.
The skeleton was found in a mass grave on Lazzaretto Nuovo - about 3km (2 miles) northeast of Venice which was used as a sanatorium for plague victims.
The belief that vampires caused the plagues may have come about by the gravediggers sometimes finding corpses swollen by gas with blood seeping from their mouths and their hair still growing. Because the process of decomposition wasn't really understood, the bodies were thought to be still alive. And because the mouth sections of the face covering shrouds became decayed by bacteria in the mouth of the corpse revealing the teeth, vampires then earned the nickname 'shroud eaters'. As the shroud was seen to be their sustenance, the ritual came about to remove the shroud and place an inedible brick in its place in the corpse's mouth.
Seemingly, medieval people thought that the vampires spread disease so that they could feed on the victims and regain their own strength so they could return to the streets.
