Do you dread a zombie attack?
Now, this is a pretty common outlook people have regarding how the apocalypse will be. Zombies are gruesome creatures we all find gross and frightening, but perhaps this is not why we find them so scary. Perhaps it’s the fact that they were normal people before becoming a mindless creature, hungry for brains and thirsty for destruction. However, would you be willing to mutilate the body of a family member to avoid them from becoming part of the living dead? I’m almost sure you wouldn’t. But there’s been some ruthless people in history, mostly those who believe in the supernatural, and the townsfolk of Wharram Percy in England weren’t exactly sweethearts.
This forgotten town, located north of Yorkshire, has been under excavation since the sixties. Here, archaeologists have studied over 130 broken pieces of bone buried between its church and graveyard. The marks they have found on these, however, are anything but common. The corpses’ age range is between 2 and 50. All showed signs of hacking, chopping, and burning. These marks have given way to the belief that these people mutilated their dead to avoid them from rising again. Locals were cold-hearted when it came to preparing a body for the grave, and it shows clearly that their fear of a vicious attack exceeded their respect for the lifeless bodies of their peers.
Archaeologists from the University of Southampton have come to the conclusion that during the early Middle Ages, this town would practice this with the sole purpose of preventing dead people from coming to life again. Given the circumstances, and how magic was pretty widespread during these centuries, it should come as no surprise that these superstitious people would want to take extreme cautions to prevent any sort of future hindrances.
In Medieval literature, there are several references to the living dead. One example of this is Chaucer’s poem The Book of the Duchess. Unsurprisingly, some written sources of the time actually detailed the exact procedure of decapitation and burning of a corpse in order to prevent further complications.
You might be wondering how did the archaeologists came to the conclusion that these measures were made to prevent the resurrection of the dead and not for some other motive, like cannibalism. The cut marks don’t coincide with butchering points: they all have the hack marks near the head instead of their joints. You might think this mistreatment of bodies was only the mark of how these people treated foreigners. Again, science would prove you wrong, for all the isotope tests show that these corpses were locals. Hence, specialists have concluded that the burn marks and cuts on all these bones show they went through a process of charring and/or mutilation because locals didn’t want them to walk again among the living.
Although this sadistic practice might have lasted for more than three centuries, the town of Wharram Percy suffered almost as terrible as an attack from the undead, probably the black plague. Now, wouldn’t that be a fine irony?
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