- [Narrator] This channel is part of the History Hit network. Stick around to find out more. (dramatic chord) (dramatic music) - [Narrator] Grotesquely
violated skeletons discovered recently in Ireland have thrown new light onto our ever growing obsession with vampires. And our fear of the undead. - This burial was very obviously treated in a violent and aggressive fashion. - This is probably the most extraordinary deviant
burial I've ever seen. I think the message is still the same. It's a very determined attempt
to keep this person down. (dramatic music) - [Narrator] Archeologists
are now investigating why these bodies were
subjected to such violence. The answer may lie in horrors that have haunted us for centuries. - Miller, 25 years old. Also showing signs of the
condition of vamprism mentioned. - There was this intense fear
of vampires and revenants, people coming back from the
dead and haunting the living. - They were basically corrupting corpses that had kind of escaped from their graves and wondered about. - [Narrator] The Irish
skeletons can help us understand our ancient
terror of the undead and even where it comes from. To explain these shocking burials, archeologists must unlock clues from mysterious medieval texts and harness modern forensic technology. The story will even
take us to a terrifying 21st century case in Romani. - (speaking in foreign language) - [Narrator] The mountains
and lakes of Western Ireland have long been seen as a land of mystery haunted by fairies and magic. In 2004, archeologists began an excavation in a little
known area called Kilteasheen that would open a window
onto our darkest fears. They were searching for a
medieval Bishop's palace dating from the 12th century. Chris Read is one of the
directors of the project. - When we started excavating, we were hoping or anticipating that this was possibly the location
of this Bishop's palace. And we were, we couldn't
have been more wrong. - [Narrator] They began to excavate underneath the flagstones of a ruined building near the lost palace. - [Narrator] If you love history, then you'll love History Hit. We have tons of exclusive documentaries about the most important people in history that you will not find anywhere else. From uncovering ancient neolithic cultures to the Dawn of the space race. History Hit has hundreds
of exclusive documentaries with unrivaled access to
the world's best historians. We're committed to bringing history fans award winning documentaries and podcasts that you
cannot find anywhere else. Sign up now for a 14 day free trial and timeline fans get 50%
off their first three months. Just be sure to use the
code timeline at checkout. - When we lifted up the
stones themselves in here, we literally had faces looking back at us, which had been crushed flat by the floor, indicating that whoever
built this building at whatever time period knew that they were building directly on top of human remains, which is quite a, a dark and gloomy kind of thing to do. Within this quite small area. Literally about three
meters by three meters, we excavated somewhere
between 30 and 40 skeletons, literally stacked one on top of another, in quite shallow graves. - [Narrator] This was just one of a series of remarkable discoveries. The team made more cuttings into a raised burial platform in the field. Each was filled with bodies. - Based upon where these
cuttings are actually located, the density of burials and their depth and if we sort of assume that the, all the areas in between are
similarly filled with burials, we're probably looking at
a total burial population of between 25,000 and 3,000 people, which makes it a very, very,
very substantial cemetery. - [Narrator] Late one morning, Chris was called over
to see a new skeleton emerging from the earth. - This skeleton in particular
was clearly treated in a very violent and aggressive fashion. Visually it's quite striking,
particularly the legs, the way they've been twisted and bent back up around the stone. It's really disturbing and
it's also shocking as well, but it also makes it very interesting. - [Narrator] It seems
that this large boulder was deliberately placed in the
grave to deform the skeleton. Professor Mark Horton
has excavated hundreds of medieval burials, and he
is astonished by the find. - I've never seen
anything so extraordinary. You couldn't actually do this naturally, it's as if this person has been broken into many bits and then bound together into
a great bundle of flesh. That the spinal column
would've come around here, round underneath the chest back around, and then the pelvis must have been here. It's almost as they broken the body up, bound it in such a way that it couldn't possibly ever come back to life again. In my entire career I've never ever seen anything quite like it. - [Narrator] As they dug further down into the layers of burials, there were more remarkable fines. - On archeological sites the
best part of the excavation is when somebody shouts out loud,
I found something, you know, everybody come look and as the
skeleton was being uncovered, it was very, very clear that yeah, there was this large
stone stuck in the mouth. Visually, it's a very
dramatic sort of image. - [Narrator] None of the team had ever found anything like it before, but then there was another discovery. - You always expect to
find something unexpected on an excavation, but then when we found a second one and in the exact same area, we knew we had something that was special. - [Narrator] But why
were these bodies treated with such violence after
they were already dead? The archeologists removed the
three skeletons from the site, along with more than a
hundred other burials. They took them back to the
lab for further analysis. As the skeletons were cleaned, shocking evidence emerged about the deaths of some of those buried in the cemetery. (people yelling) - Chris, do you think
these look like cut marks? - [Chris] Yeah, definitely. No, that's a big, big chop mark, and then a smaller one parallel to it. Very, very straight edge. - [Narrator] The cut marks suggest that some of the Kilteasheen bodies were killed by bladed weapons
like swords or spears. - In that time in Ireland, you have multiple different
king ships in the region. Each of them is vying for authority. Warfare is an almost an
endemic part of society in these periods and the, the role of warriors comes
through very strongly when we look at the literature and the evidence that survives. People were aware of the constant fear and aggression that could
be part of their lives. - [Narrator] Even in this violent age, the mutilation of these
bodies was extraordinary. Were the people who buried them afraid of what they might become? The strange burials in Ireland are not the only ones
that have been found. They've also been discovered
all over Western Europe, skeletons weighed down with large boulders were excavated in a Czech
Republic in the 1960s. Bizarre burials have also
been found in England. - And for medieval burial in
Southwell were found nails, not these actual ones,
but very similar ones. Those have been deliberately
placed in the body. So one was found through
the right shoulder. Another one was through the heart and another one through the left ankle, almost as if they
deliberately place them there to make sure that the body
could never rise up again. - A number of burials have been
excavated of people who have either had their heads cut
off or been placed face down or had the legs tied or been
mutated in various other ways. There's even one that's got
a spear thrust through it. - [Narrator] Archeologists and historians are beginning to believe that there may be a very particular reason for these disturbing medieval burials. - I think the general
explanation for this has to be that these are people
who are seen as a threat. They're gonna go on walking
around after they've died, they're gonna come outta their graves and the living have to keep them down. - [Narrator] Could this explain the extraordinary
Kilteasheen skeletons with the rocks in their mouths? Were they treat it as people who might return from the dead? Dr. Catriona McKenzie
is an osteo archeologist specializing in bone analysis. She will examine the
skeletons for any clues that could explain why they
were buried so violently. - The thing that interests me most is that when you look at the skeleton, you're looking at an actual
human being who lived and died long ago, and you're looking almost
directly into the past. It's always really exciting
when there is something unusual about the skeleton
or about the very position, because you just can't help but wonder what it was that happened in this person's life that meant that they were buried
in a different manner. - [Narrator] Katrina has
reassembled one of the skeletons with the stone found in its jaws. - This individual is a male individual. It's a young adult, which is probably between
30 to 35 years of age. - [Narrator] These bare bones can give us a glimpse of what
this man might have been like. - He was quite a muscular individual. He's got quite prominent muscle
markings on his skeleton, which shows that he was quite physically active during his life. - [Narrator] But it is the
stone that intrigues her. - This is the stone which was forced into the jars of burial 102, as you can see, it's quite large and it's quite heavy as well. It's triangular in shape, yeah I've not seen anything quite like this before in my own experience. - [Narrator] Could the skull itself reveal any further clues about why the body was treated so violently? When it was recovered from the earth, it was already in an
extremely fragile state. As the team cleaned and
prepared it for analysis, they began to realize
the extent of the damage. - [Chris] Do you think there's any chance of the skull actually
being pieced back together? - I don't think it's gonna be possible for us to reconstruct it more than I already have. The facial buns were very crushed when they were in the ground. And so I literally have
hundreds of tiny fragments of mostly facial ones, which it would be near impossible to piece it all back together. - [Narrator] The past
is not going to unlock its secrets easily for the
Kilteasheen archeologists. Centuries of farming on the land may well have damaged the skull, but even graveyards that
haven't been farmed or built on can yield skeletons in strange positions. At Barkley in Gloucestershire, another cemetery is under excavation. Project leader Professor Mark Horton knows how easily bodies can shift from the position in which they were buried. - This is a, a fairly normal
early medieval burial. You can see the bones are in the ground, the arm bone, the skull, and so forth. We just found, we we're
cleaning it up at the moment, but how body reaches this position is quite a complicated process. Some bodies literally blow up underground as the gases are generated,
and it's in the confined space. And you know, there's stories of people walking around church yards and you hear them going pop pop as these bodies are exploding. Bones can go everywhere, if you like. In fact, here, you can see probably the skull wasn't laid in that position might have
fallen over into that position. So when people discover
bodies in the ground, they can be in all sorts
of extraordinary positions, they're not necessarily
how they've been laid down. - [Narrator] So could this explain the strange burials of Kilteasheen? Could the stones in the jaws somehow have slipped in there by accident as the result of violent
contortions during decomposition? Chris Read is convinced,
this is not the explanation. - It was very obviously intentional. This is not a stone which
rolled into the mouth after the burial process had, had been completed or
through later disturbance. It could only have gotten there if it was put in quite forcefully. - The burials with the
stones in the mouths are very interesting, cause they're, they're large boulders and they look like they've been pushed in with
some force into the dead body. And it suggests that they're
trying to block the mouth and that could be to stop a soul, having left the dead body from, from reentering into it
and reanimating that body so it could rise from the dead. - [Narrator] There is another feature of the Kilteasheen burials, which confirms that they
were entirely deliberate. The bodies were discovered right
on the edge of the cemetery as if they were exiled
from the other graves. - We had picked up the
edges of a shallow ditch here in the cutting and it's within this ditch
that we actually found our, the first of our two
stone and mouth skeletons. So it was sort of lying
out on, on this axis, which is not quite east west, but north, Northwest, Southeast, and the body would've been lying this way with its feet slightly raised, cause on one side of the ditch and the head slightly raised at this side, looking in this direction with the (clicks) stone in the mouth. - [Narrator] Archeologists use a special term for these strange burials in Ireland and elsewhere, they
call them deviant burials. - Deviant means abnormal. Anything that's particularly
strange or uncharacteristic, not what you would expect from a Christian burial in this period. The Christian faith had well established cannon of beliefs, you
don't take objects with you. When the world ends, everyone will rise from their grave and face the rising sun, so that burials are
orientated east to west. And because this was such
a matter of conformity, I think when there's a deviation away from that expected pattern, it suggests some
deliberate thought process has gone behind why you are
doing something so abnormal. - [Narrator] All the evidence suggests that the deviant Kilteasheen burials were treated as if the dead
might return from the grave and become the medieval
equivalent of vampires. Today, vampires have become entertainment, but in the 12th century they
were frighteningly real. - The medieval mind lived in a world of monsters and dragons. They believed in supernatural events. So the notion that the
body could come back and be reanimated wasn't that strange, but actually the ideas were very much fostered by the church. Cause when the soul left, the body went to a place called purgatory. And if the soul, the person had left a
particularly evil life, that soul will be tortured in
the most horrendous fashion. And so the notion that it
would escape from purgatory and come back to haunt the
earth was a very powerful idea. - [Narrator] Chronicles and histories from the period recorded
terrifying stories about the undead as if they were true. Historian, John Blair has
come to St. Peter's church in Stapenhill near Burton on Trent. He's on the trail of a
particularly chilling account, which demonstrates the
reality of this fear. - The extraordinary story of the Stapenhill vampires begins when two peasants on
Burton Abbey territory are poached by a Lord nearby and he persuades them
to move to the village of Drakelow which is just down the road. - [Narrator] The story is set in 1085, when the peasants were moving to a thriving community of
several hundred people, but soon their fortunes changed. - They come to a very nasty end because they die suddenly
while they're eating. And they're buried here in
this churchyard behind me. The next night they're seen walking around sometimes in the form of men
with coffins on their backs and sometimes in the form of animals. This must have been enormously
frightening to these people who clearly thought that
they were confronted really, with the living dead. - [Narrator] Historians call those who returned from the grave revenants. In medieval times, it was believed they had terrifying powers to make animals and people
fall sick and even die. - We get quite vivid accounts in the 12th century about revenants. They are often returning to
the place where they lived and they are often waking
up their neighbors at night and telling them to come out or calling people they know by name. And then these people will
mysteriously die of some plague in the few days after. - [Narrator] The villages of Drakelow had no doubt that they were
confronting the evil dead. - Everybody got so frightened
that they moved away and soon, the village was almost deserted. The villages got very worried about this and they got permission from the Bishop to dig the two peasants up. (woman screams) They found that the
bodies were uncorrupted, but the cloths over their
faces were stained with blood. - [Narrator] The villagers were terrified. They took the bodies from their
coffins and beheaded them. Then they cut open the corpses
and tore out their hearts. - They carried the
hearts quite a long way, probably to this hill top we're on now. It's not quite certain, but it's likely that it was this place, which was later a beacon
for warnings and signals and may have been a place
for executing criminals. - [Narrator] The dead
villages were treated as if they were still alive. They were executed as
punishment for crimes they had committed after their deaths. It is said that two black crows rose and flew out of the smoke
from the burning hearts. The thin veil between life and death could easily be crossed. Some were so fearful of
returning as a revenant that they left detailed
instructions on how to avoid it. - One of the very best descriptions we've got on the practice of revenants in the middle ages comes from here, from
Berkeley in Gloucester. It's told by William of Marmsbury, one of the most reliable
of the medieval Chronicles writing in the 12th century. And he describes a witch living here in the nunnery in the 1060s who was so worried that her body was going to be reanimated
after her death, that she left very specific instructions that when she died, she should be sewn up in a stag skin, placed
in a stone sarcophagus. And then that should
then be wrapped around with three massive sets
of chains and locks and buried in the ground. Well, what actually happened was that the body was placed in the ground and everyone did
incantation for three days. But even that didn't stop the devil who according to the story
came on a black horse, dug up the body, broke the chains asunder and took the witch away to
haunt this place forever after. - [Narrator] There are many other stories about the undead recorded
by priests and chroniclers in the 12th century. Could the deviant Kilteasheen burials date from the same time as
these extraordinary stories? The Irish team are going to carbon date. the two skeletons to find out. Samples will be sent off for analysis to discover just when these people died. These ancient beliefs in
the undead have survived in literature and folklore for centuries. Even today in parts of central Europe, people guard against the
possibility of the dead rising from the grave. Modern archeology is reinforcing
the reality of these fears, as it reveals burials in which bodies have been staked, chained and weighed down with heavy stones. But how did this fear evolve into what we recognize as the vampire? The blood sucking creature that stalks our TV screens and our nightmares. How did a folk terror
become a modern fascination? In December, 1732, a team of Austrian military doctors who were sent to investigate
a disturbing series of deaths in a Serbian village, then part
of Austro-Hungarian empire. The doctors were led by a senior surgeon called johannes Fluckingham. - A woman by the name of Star. - Fluckingham would've been a highly trained surgeon for the period. Military surgeons were the
best surgeons you could have. They were working at a very fast pace. They had more patients than any other surgeons could ever see, and they had to operate
quickly and efficiently. So the training you would've
had as a military surgeon, would've been extremely high. - [Narrator] The villagers claimed that 17 people had died suddenly
over a three month period. And that many of them had become vampires. - She is quite complete and un-decayed. - Fluckingham meticulously
recorded his observations. In this new age of science, he thought that the village's beliefs belonged to the medieval past. - She had herself said before her death, that she painted herself
with the blood of a vampire. Wherefore both she and her child who died right after birth
must also become vampires. - Fluckingham's main mission
would've been to quash any idea that vampires were real and also to get to the bottom
of what exactly was going on. One of the big concerns would've
been for the authorities, was there an epidemic of some sort? - [Narrator] But as the
coffins were opened, one by one Fluckingham's his observations
became more disturbing. - What he would've noted
when he went inside the body was only four of them were
decomposing naturally, or what he assumed was natural. - The new nails are evident
along with fresh and vivid skin. - All of these things didn't seem to be consistent with how he thought bodies should be decomposing. - Upon the opening of the body. There was revealed a quantity
of fresh extravascular blood. - [Narrator] What the doctors were seeing contradicted their medical training. - Not, as is usual, filled
with coagulative blood. - Modern medicine would recognize that these symptoms of vampire were simply the normal
process of decomposition. - Miller, 25 years old. - [Narrator] Bodies can
seem to be plump and healthy because of gases swelling
up in the dead tissue. - By the name of Melisza. - [Narrator] Blood stains around the mouth are the result of stomach
fluids leaking out. - She also was in a state of vampirism. - None of these bodies had been buried for more than three months. And that means that the
first body would've been buried in September
allowing for a cold autumn. It's easy to imagine that the body would've stayed relatively well preserved. - Fluckingham's report
into the vampire corpses was sent back to Belgrade and was seized on by the newspapers. The story exploded across Europe, fascinating thousands of readers and causing terror in many more. - This report got picked
up by other sources, in particular by newspapers, which were read by other people in Europe, the intelligentsia of Europe. And it kind of spread not just in Serbia, not just in our Austro-Hungarian empire, but eventually all through Western Europe. Serbian reports of vampire, although they were localized, generated an extremely high level of fear. - I think you could compare them best to modern rumor panics, where you get a kind of anomalous event, which is then linked on to kind of fears which are already in the population. But it's very, very
intense, very, very real. And this is really what
happened in Serbia. - [Narrator] In villages
across central Europe, a vampire hunt began. Graves of the recently
deceased were opened and the corpses were
beheaded and often burnt. Were the same scenes played
out in medieval Ireland when the deviant burials
were placed in their graves? Were these bodies feared as vampires? The terrifying tales from Eastern Europe inspired a series of best selling novels that would take the vampire
myth to the next level. - The vampire comes into European folklore in literature at the
beginning of the 19th century. Just very at the beginning and again, it's through these translations of these descriptions of the 18th century. And the first time we really
see it is Dr. Polidori, who is writing along with
Byron and Mary Shelley at this wonderful sort of
summer camp in Switzerland. And he takes this notion of the vampire and kind of turns it
into the Byronic hero. He was actually thinking of Lord Byron. So this is the first major change. What had been really scary, foul vampires become really attractive,
dangerous aristocrats. - [Narrator] In 1898, Bram Stoker transformed the idea of the dangerous dead into the sophisticated predatory vampire at the heart of so much film and fiction. - [Announcer] Now come inside and experience the Dracula story. - [Narrator] Dracula was set partly in gothic ruins of Whitby Abbey which Stoker explored during his holidays in the Yorkshire coast. He chose Whitby as the
landing place for Dracula when the evil count
first arrives in England. (dramatic music) - Stoker's sources were exactly
these 18th century panics and these had been written
up, published and translated. And by the time Stoker was writing, people were going to Eastern Europe. The tourist industry was, was
well and truly established. And Stoker really knew about this kind of strange edge of Europe. - The superstitions that Stoker harnessed in writing Dracula are still
alive in the 21st century. In parts of central Europe, fear of the undead
remains chillingly real. (dramatic music) In Maratino Disuse, a small village in Southern Romania relatives take care to seal fresh graves by circling around them with incense. (people chattering in foreign language) Villagers bring the deceased food to ensure they have everything they need for the journey into the next world. (people chattering in foreign language) But sometimes the ritual
precautions aren't enough. In 2004, five men went
to the village cemetery to exhume the corpse of
a man called Petra Toma who had died recently. Toma's niece, Mirela Manescu claimed he had become a
(speaking in foreign language). a Romanian word for the undead. - (speaking in foreign language) - Mirela believed that the (speaking in foreign
language) would kill her. So her husband asked farmer Juan Manescu to help him in destroying the creature. - (speaking in foreign language) - [Narrator] It's chillingly similar to the story of the
Stapenhill vampires in England recorded almost a thousand years ago. - (speaking in foreign language) - [Narrator] The villages were going to destroy the (speaking
in foreign language) by cutting out the dead man's heart. On the first night, they couldn't find it. So they went back a second time. This time they succeeded. They collected straw and dried
corn husks to make a fire. - [Juan] (speaking in foreign language) - [Narrator] Petra Toma's daughter complained about the desecration
of her father's body. The story went global. - Even for Romanians who are born in towns who don't know this practices, when the whole story
pumped out in the media, it was a very, very bad
feeling that it was a scandal. Look here, how primitive we can be. How come, what will say
the strangers, Europeans, when hearing this kind
of primitive practices. - [Narrator] The police were asked to investigate the desecration
of Petra Toma's corpse, but in most cases, these strange rituals are not reported to the
authorities or anyone else. - In such remote and isolated villages like Maration is with people, very old living in the community, such rituals are very well preserved and they are carried out in order to, to let's say protect somehow the community from such events like
are returning from dead, can be, so you can still find it in remote, rural communities, not only in Romania, but in the whole Balkan area, for example, in Serbia or in Bulgaria, or, you know it's something
that people still do. - [Narrator] The beliefs
in 21st century, Romania seem identical to the
fears in medieval England almost a thousand years ago. - It is quite amazing the level of continuity that we can see in these beliefs in Europe
across a very broad time span. And I think it shows that, you know, people feel not everything
can be explained rationally. There is still space, even in modern society
for fear and superstition. - [Narrator] This deep
seated terror of the undead has lasted at least a thousand years, from the middle ages to the present day. Could its roots in Ireland be even older? (dramatic music) (dramatic music) The archeologists investigating
the deviant burials found at Kilteasheen are
waiting for the results of carbon 14 dates, which will tell them when
these individuals died. Chris Read is on his way to
the lab to get the results. - It's one of the treats
for us archeologists to actually get a date back. Cause I suppose more than any
other sort of bit of analysis, it allows us to do what
we're supposed to do, which is put the site in some
kind of chronological order. My own feelings is that it's early, rather than later medieval, somewhere in the eighth,
ninth century, that would be, that would be what I would be thinking. And I like being right, so
I hope that's what it is. - [Narrator] It will be remarkable if Chris can trace this
fear of the vampire dead back several centuries before the earliest medieval accounts. Two weeks after the samples were taken from the deviant burials, the
carbon 14 dates are now in. - The results were actually emailed to me last night from
the company in Miami. And so just gonna have a look here. Right, okay. It looks like both of the burials date to anywhere from the late seventh
century to the ninth century. And both of the dates seemed to overlap in the middle, of middle
of the eighth century. So anywhere from about 720 to 750, 760. - [Narrator] So the Irish skeletons with the stones in
their mouths were buried at least 300 years before the stories of the undead in England. Remarkably, there are
records from the same period suggesting that the fear of revenants and vampires was common. - One of the fascinating things about the dating of those burials is that they fit very well with
the Irish penitential texts that were written in that period. So we've got one of
these penitential texts from probably the seventh
or eighth centuries, it's called the First
Senate Of St. Patrick. And one of the things
it describes in there is about the fear of the living dead. So it says that anybody
who believes in vampires should be put outside the church. What that actually
shows was that there was a lot of people who believed in something like vampires in Ireland. This is a fascinating
example of where you've got archeology matching up very well with our historical sources. - [Narrator] But why would this fear have been so powerful in this period? John Blair believes that
the arrival of Christianity may have triggered a wave of phobia. - Anthropologists have shown that when old established belief systems get disrupted by the
appearance of monotheism by Christianity or Islam or Buddhism, that very often they
can take curious forms. Now, an obvious possible context for that would be seventh century England with the conversion of the Kings and then the kingdoms to Christianity between about 600 and about 660. And he's very interesting with a lot of the deviant burials
come from that period. And so it may be that a
heightened sense of fear at certain categories of people who maybe seem to be a
threat after their deaths is something that comes when Christianity undercuts the old beliefs and people are unsure what
they should believe in. - [Narrator] Those fears
seem to have driven people to treat the Kilteasheen
skeletons with extreme brutality. In the same way in modern Romania, cutting the heart out from a dead relative might seem to be a barbaric act. But there is another way of
understanding these rituals, in Romania they're seen as helping them (speaking
in foreign language). - The dead have to be dead,
not undead or half dead. So they are doing him, something
good, not something bad. So it's about universal cosmic harmony. So the dead with the dead,
the alive with alive. So for the community is very good, for the dead is very good. So where is a harm for them? - [Narrator] Slaying a
(speaking in foreign language) stops him from being trapped between this world and the next. It literally saves him from
a fate worse than death. - The main difference between the (speaking in foreign
language) and the vampire is that the vampire would kill to, to be sure that he would live ever after, let's say the (speaking
in foreign language) or the (speaking in foreign language) in the Romanian traditional
culture, do nothing else, but signal that something
is wrong with him and he need need assistance
from the community to properly integrate
it into the other world. (dramatic music) - (speaking in foreign language) - [Narrator] It's
extraordinary how this modern folklore could be the key to understanding a deep rooted fear that can never be explained by archeology and science alone. - Archeologists always
have been very reluctant to use folklore or folklore traditions as a way of explaining ideas in the past that well, they may have been reinvented in the 17th, 18th, 19th centuries. Can we rarely get into the medieval mind? And I think there's often a lot of truth behind these folklore stories. I'm sure that as more
examples are published, archeologists will become sensitized. That actually, when they
find stones in burials or they find nails in
burial places and so forth, they'll begin to say, ah, maybe that's a revenant
burial and publish it. And so hopefully as awareness increases, so we'll begin to
recognize that's actually, it wasn't very rare thing, but actually really quite
common in the middle ages. - [Narrator] For archeologist Chris Read, the deviant burials have
enriched his understanding of Ireland's mysterious medieval past. - The stone in mouth skeletons when they were first discovered, none of us really understood
the potential importance of the more significance
in the wider scheme. But as time has gone on, we've all realized just how
special they actually are and how unique within an Irish context. - [Narrator] Farmer John Burke
owns the land at Kilteasheen where the skeletons were found. He believes that whatever the reasons for these strange burials, the bodies should now be
returned to their graves and left to rest in peace. - It's a strange thing, but
my dad would always have said, this was a very peaceful place. For me, it's a sacred place and it will always be a sacred place with no particular fear
or thoughts or otherwise. And in a way I feel almost
in a way responsible or a duty bound to respect the
people who are buried there. They, those people they weren't
brought from anywhere else. They're the local people's ancestors. And I respect that. And I think we're privileged to have this kind of sight on our land. (dramatic music)
