Why Do We Fear The Dead? | Gods And Monsters | Timeline

one of the great privileges of working at history here and making films together with our team at timeline is the access we get to extraordinary historical locations like this one stonehenge i'm right in the middle of the stone circle now it is an absolutely extraordinary place to visit if you want to watch the documentary like the one we're producing here go to history hit tv it's like netflix for history and if you use the code timeline when you check out you'll get a special introductory offer see you there officially we britons have been christian for more than fifteen hundred years but scratch the surface and you'll find our ancestors believed in far more than christ and the cross [Music] pagan gods witches demons evil spirits were all proclaimed as terrifying fact now i want to uncover what beliefs and fears really built britain this week along with a team of top historians i'm investigating the dark superstitions we once had about dead bodies i'll be discovering why our ancestors were so scared of corpses they'd mutilate them in their graves what power enabled a dead body to convict a murderer if at any point the corpse began to bleed this would be seen as a sign of guilt why would our forefathers think a corpse was full of life it's almost and when did you need to kill someone a second time he's certainly not going to rise from the dead again now ensure uncertain hope of the resurrection to eternal life through our lord jesus christ we commend to almighty god our brother anthony and we commit his body to the ground earth to earth ashes to ashes dust to dust what happens to us when we die is a question that's intrigued and perplexed humankind more than any other even today when scientists paint a bleak picture of death being the end of everything there are still millions of people who cling to a belief in the afterlife but for our ancestors this didn't just mean an everlasting soul it meant the body lived on too the idea of the body being needed after death is age thousands of years ago the ancient egyptians lavished fortunes mummifying the deceased for the next world but here in britain we had a nasty habit of attacking dead bodies rather than preserving them it's a tradition that started back in pagan times and continued right through to the 19th century [Music] i want to find out what this macabre practice was all about and why our ancestors thought it was necessary so i've come to london's east end to meet historian dr mark robson he's been researching one of the last known cases of corpse mutilation just 200 years ago the body of a dead man was paraded along these streets [Music] and then staked through the heart we're talking about someone called john williams yeah he was thought to have been the murderer of at least seven people where this blue partition now is next to the pub used to be a draper shop of the ma family and that was the first set of victims john williams was arrested but before his trial he committed suicide in prison his corpse was then subjected to a barbaric centuries-old practice [Music] the ritual began with his corpse being loaded on a cart it was then paraded through the streets in front of thousands of people so this is the place where the most important event of all happened in this parade because once williams's body reached this point a particular kind of ritual had been prepared for it this is where the body gets staked [Music] so the staking took place on this crossroads yeah right in the middle there by the time the parade arrived coming up this street the grave had already been dug in preparation for it but this isn't a proper grade this is a small hole into which the body had to be forced at that point the stake is driven through your back and then you're very quickly buried again first in quick line then in soil this is quite extraordinary isn't it to think that 200 years ago slap bang there in the the middle of this crossroads there's some bloke with a stake absolutely right how high up did the stake stick there was enough of the stake left to still appear above ground level to act as a constant reminder of what it was that had happened on this spot but what makes this macabre story even more astonishing is that this wasn't an isolated incident we know of at least seven other stakings bizarrely all suicides that took place around the same time and as the parliamentary archives reveal the british government was well aware of what was going on there's lots of evidence particularly in the east anglia region and where there are at least half a dozen that are recorded what have you got this is a piece from the ipswich journal from 1779 in which it takes us through the case of sale and carter and it tells us that cell took a dose of arsenic and he expired about seven o'clock in the evening the coroner's inquest sat on the body and brought in their verdict self-murder in consequence of which he was buried in the king's highway and a stake driven through his body got another one here mary turl the unfortunate wretch took poison a coroner's inquest was whole held when the jury gave their verdict on the same evening she was buried in the high road with a stake driven through her body what intrigues me is that it's not just kind of daft old peasants who are believing this you've got the coroner you've got the jury all buying into it the authorities seem to be colluding in this practice absolutely yeah and in the end it has to be a higher authority which puts an end to it and so in 1823 we actually get an act passed which specifically outlaws this part of the punishment of criminals and it talks um very specifically about the stake so what's it say but as such coroner or the other officer shall give directions for the private internment of the remains of such person fellow to say without any stake being driven through the body yeah it's this mark of a superstitious attitude towards the body that gets outlawed these stakings were some of the last cases in the macabre history of british corpse mutilation i want to find out where this tradition came from why did our ancestors fear the dead and what was it about suicide in particular that could make your corpse an object of terror to uncover the answers i need to go back in time to see when this practice of corpse mutilation first started so i'm on my way to see two remarkable scottish skeletons from the second century a.d a time when we were resolutely pagan [Music] archaeologist sue anderson was one of the team that excavated these two decapitated men these are so weirdly laid out is this how they were found yes pretty much this one had his um his head between his legs the other one was actually holding his skull we've seen bodies like this down south before um in england in the 4th century these ones are actually second century which is quite early for a decapitated body yeah how old this person was i think he's in his 50s possibly slightly older have you any idea whether the head was chopped off before they were killed or whether it was severed after they were dead well the evidence suggests that they were cut off after death and the reason for that is we've got several small cuts which don't actually go right through the neck just as deep as the bone to begin with and then there's the final cut which goes through so it would be difficult to do that if somebody was still alive and kicking so if you were killing me in that way three small cuts one of which went through but the other two didn't it would have been very bloody if if the person had been alive but we believed that they were dead at the time um because if you cut somebody through there when they're alive then you tend to get a lot of blood and you won't be able to see what you're doing so if you wanted to kill them by removing their heads you do the traditional chopping your head off that way yeah what about the other one this one he's the same age but in this case he was actually buried holding his holding his head to one side why well it may be something to do with the celtic religions where a severed head was seen as quite a powerful object um possibly to do with magic possibly to do with healing but there are other other theories about that like what well the suggestion that he might have had his head cut off to stop him walking among the living as a ghost and that's quite a popular theory so the practice of mutilating a corpse to prevent it rising from the dead could date back more than 2 000 years and the stakings suggest it lasted deep into the 19th century so what was going on in the minds of our ancestors why did they believe a corpse could live again [Music] and what did they fear it would do i've come to northumberland to meet professor john blair at anik castle he thinks an account of a servant's death in the 12th century could yield vital clues [Music] it was written by a contemporary historian william of nubra when britain wasn't pagan but so fervently christian that richard the lionheart was spreading the faith through the bloody crusades here is william of nubra's story and he describes how a man of bad life came to the castle and then he married but william says that that was actually a disaster for him because he heard things about his wife and became suspicious and so he told her he was going to go away for a few days but in fact he crept back secretly and climbed into the room and got up and hid in the rafters all right i'm this bloke yeah you go out to the roof up here we've got the rafters right i'm the bloke watching his wife and the wife's committing adultery with a young man and you get so angry that you forget you're perched on a rafter you fall off and you crash down into the room you're horribly injured not dead not dead no no he's just injured and his wife his wife pretends to be terribly anxious and she comes and comforts him but he pushes her away oh go away you adulterous [ __ ] and the wife says no you're mad you've hit your head and you're seeing things so then you're carried off to bed yeah and the priest comes and offers you the last rights i don't want the last rights i'll have him tomorrow yes but by tomorrow he's dead so he never gets the sacrament and he he dies during the night but despite that he's given christian burial and he's taken off to the church dying without taking the last rights was considered a terrible thing in 12th century britain it meant the soul couldn't pass securely through to the next life nubra's account reveals that the people of anak were about to find out just how terrifying the consequences could be the night after the funeral the dead man got up out of the grave and he walked around the town what did the people of the town think of that they ran into their houses and they bolted the doors they didn't come out till dawn i'm not surprised but it didn't do them any good because the air became infected by the putrid corpse so that there was a plague many people died and quite a lot more got ill and those who survived mostly ran away so after a few days the town was almost deserted the walking corpse appeared to be hell bent on killing all who lived here but what could the villagers do to slay this unholy monster their solution was truly gruesome two young men whose father had died because of this took the law into their own hands and they went and got a matak and came down to the graveyard and starting to open the grave it's like a hammer horror isn't it william then says that when they uncovered the corpse they found that it was horribly bloated and swollen and the face was red yes and the shroud in which the body had been wrapped was almost torn to shreds and this is where the story ends because the two brothers carried the body out of the town and they built a big pyre to burn it but then they realized they couldn't burn the body until they taken the heart out so they got their matter cut open the side of the body took out the heart and they throw it on the fire and as the heart burned all the bad air blew away and the sick people recovered and the town was back again on its feet after this awful play this isn't a ghost story this is about a fear that the dead can physically rise out of their graves in order to harm people when the people here in anik opened the coffin of their plague breathing corpse they believed they had physical evidence that this was a fact and not fiction i want to find out exactly what it was they saw and what they thought their undead creature really was i'm about to conduct my own gruesome experiment to find out why a corpse can seem very much alive i'm trying to uncover why we britons have such a lurid history of corpse mutilation from the romans right up until the 19th century our ancestors butchered dead bodies to keep the living safe [Music] my quest has led me to 12th century anik a town that was terrorized by a plague breathing corpse [Music] when the good people of anik dug up the body in order to slay the corpse they saw something that made them believe that body had lived on after death but what was it they saw that made them believe that that was possible to find out i'm going to dig up a body that's been buried for three weeks dr anna williams and dr carl harrison of the forensic department at cranfield university have come along to help me examine the corpse there's a three-week old pig under here somewhere i've chosen a pig because apparently it decays in a similar way to a human being it's one that was shot because its leg was broken i have no idea what it's going to be like i've never done anything like this before oh the lid's coming up [Music] should take it off yes the pig has been wrapped in a cotton shroud and buried in earth like most 12th century corpses our box is simply to stop animals eating it these mildew patches if you um if you feel the top you feel there's still a lot of tension there of gaseous decomposition it's tort isn't it under the shroud it's like a big balloon ah there we go there you go oh got a handful of maggots here look it's crawling with them down this end oh got a first knife i think you're down at the snout in oh dear dear oh dear yep yeah oh very taut and bloated yeah every time i breathe in it makes what a gag rather than wasting away the pig is actually surprisingly big this is due to the gases produced when flesh decomposes getting trapped within the carcass causing it to swell what happens to all this gas that's inside it well there are only really one or two places that it can come out and that could uh that could make it sound as though it was still alive if it comes out the mouth it might grunt or the other end that would be creepy wouldn't it if you dug up a body and it farted oh my oh my you can see some bloody bubbles that are actually coming out of the nose can't you it's almost breathing imagine if you were 12th century peasant and you saw someone who had been in a grave for three weeks and their mouth was bubbling with this bloody stuff actually the hair hasn't decayed or broken up or anything it's all very resilient in the grave and would be around for some time as would the skin be and i believe that people used to think that the hair continued to grow after death because it looked longer than when they'd last seen the person alive and but that's just caused by this the skin shrinking back due to dehydration the same thing with the nails the skin around the the cuticles shrinks back making the nails look longer but you can see why if you just dug up a person and all this was going on you'd think that under the ground they'd been chomping at the shroud and trying to get it off and still bleeding when the two brothers dug up the corpse at anik they cut open the body to take out the heart but slicing the flesh may have given them even more reason to think this corpse was still alive well that's really bubbling isn't that you see the amount of gas that's still trapped there within the tissues yeah yeah yeah you can really see can't you what it would have been like if that was coming out of the mouth of a dead body that had been underground for three weeks you'd be really freaked out wouldn't you absolutely it's easy to understand why eight or nine hundred years ago our ancestors would have thought that there was still life in corpses you've got the bubbling blood around the mouth and the nose lots of hair if it had been a human being the nails would have been appearing to grow and this bloating is really quite interesting because it makes the body really look quite quite sleek and alive this pig may be dead but it wouldn't be difficult to believe it was still alive so it was our ancestors lack of knowledge of how the human body decays after death that helped fuel beliefs that corpses can live on but what was it the two brothers thought this undead creature actually was when they uncovered it today the word zombie springs to mind but this is the language of 20th century horror films and of course our medieval ancestors didn't go to the movies what they did have as a reference though was a book a book in which a body rose from the dead not as a ghost but just like their corpse as real flesh and blood and it was a book they would have known well because it's one of the most influential in the whole of history [Music] i'm trying to find out why our ancestors were so afraid of dead bodies that they'd mutilate them in their graves i've discovered that a corpse doesn't always decompose as you might think and this fueled the belief our bodies can live on in death [Music] but what intrigues me is what else was behind this belief and when it comes to ideas about what happens to the body and soul in the afterlife there's only one place to go the church [Music] in medieval times the doctrine of the church wasn't open to question doubt was heresy people believed what they heard here was fact this is where we could discover the truth about our creation and the ends of our mortal lives the key part of the medieval religious service was the mass it was based on the idea of eating the flesh and drinking the blood of jesus christ a man who had miraculously risen from the grave to show me what this has to do with the undead in britain professor peter marshall has invited me to andrew's church in chesterton every mass is the performance of a miracle through the words of the mass the priest repeating the words of jesus from the last supper the priest transforms the bread and wine into the literal physical body and blood of christ at the high point of the mass a bell is wrong the bread is lifted aloft the congregation looks at it and they are seeing their god jesus body has become literally physically present so the church isn't just interested in spirituality it's interested in the body oh absolutely i mean you can't have christianity without the body it's central idea of course is that god takes a body in becoming jesus christ the idea of the incarnation and that that body of jesus when it dies on the cross is three days later raised again but our ancestors weren't just told that the corpse of jesus could live again they too could rise from the dead when the time came if you're looking in that direction you would have seen this fantastic mural in all its glory which is it's all about bodies isn't it absolutely and this is really extending the story of christ's resurrection to the general resurrection of all the dead this is what is called a doom painting and the word doom here means judgment [Music] the end of time when jesus returns in majesty the graves open and the bodies rise up and the bodies of those who are saved are reunited with their souls and led off to bliss in heaven the bodies of those who are damned are reunited with their souls for even more intense torments in hell and those good and bad are actually real human beings with real bodies absolutely yes it's not of course a doctrine of the church that the the dead would walk again physically before the day of the resurrection but i think you know if we remember that people here every week looking at these scenes the idea of the body and the body rising from the tomb is going to be a pretty familiar one for our ancestors death clearly wasn't the end of the human body it had a vital role to play in the afterlife to let us physically meet our maker on the day of judgment but this didn't necessarily mean that a human corpse would remain motionless in its grave until then because many people believed that even after its death it retained some kind of force or spirit and that energy could get it to do amazing things like communicate with the living from the other side that's incredible because it actually feels quite clammy although if he was really dead that would be rigger mortis it's a superstition portrayed in 1591 by britain's greatest writer william shakespeare in the tragedy richard the third actress anna belapsian and a special effects team are helping me look at the scene in which the future king richard iii approaches the corpse of henry vi the man he murdered annabelle researched this superstition for her role of lady anne with the royal shakespeare company we're about to take the body off to have him buried and you make them put him down i'm rich is the third yes okay you're bad stay you that bear the corpse and set it down and then you say my lord stand back and let the coffin pass unmanned dog stand out when i command advance thy halberd higher than my breast or bison paul i'll strike me to my foot that wasn't bad was that very good and now i tell you to go away a vaunch thou dreadful minister of hell thou hast put power over his mortal body his soul thou canst not have therefore be gone which means what she said is that you could have power over his body but not over his soul but what now happens suggests that his soul is still in his body because he starts to bleed when his murderer comes near so now the big reveal yes so now i'm going to say okay if you want to hang around see what you've done if thou delight to view thy heinous deeds behold this pattern of thy butcheries so now the blood starts to come out which she wasn't expecting oh gentlemen see see dead henry's wounds open their congealed mouth and bleed afresh flush blush thou lump of foul deformity for it is thy presence that exhales this blood from cold and empty veins where no blood dwells it would be extraordinary wouldn't it if if you were a really confident person you'd killed someone you came in to look at their body and then it started bleeding it proves to her that you were the murderer of her father thy deed inhuman and unnatural provokes this deluge most unnatural so she's saying this is proof that you're the killer do you think the the audience in those days would have realized the significance of this that it was actually pointing the finger at me as the murderer yes definitely because this was a commonly held superstition that if you murdered somebody and you went close and they bled that was proof that you were indeed the murderer so yes they would get that imagine how you would feel if you saw that came into a room there was a dead body and that's what you saw so shakespeare wasn't using dramatic license the belief that the corpse of a murder victim had the power to identify its killer was so deeply held it was used as evidence in murder trials right up to the 19th century it's an incredible belief so what do people think was actually going on historian dr lindsey fitzharris and pathologist dr stuart hamilton are going to show me this idea that the corpse would bleed in the presence of a murder goes all the way back to the 6th century just after the fall of the roman empire and it persists well into the 19th century so these ideas um were very prevalent and in fact they were given legal recognition starting in the ninth century okay so how did that work well if i could just step you through it if you were the suspect and you were entering you would slowly approach the corpse rather like richard iii did yeah yes absolutely and you would call out his name as you circled the beer two or three times henry henry yeah and then at the end you would touch the wounds or you'd even prod the wounds oh really well no wonder it started bleeding if i'm prodding them yeah and if at any point the corpse began to bleed this would be seen as a sign of guilt but it's all a bit of a lottery isn't it i mean you could have five people walking around the body and feeling it who knows when it's going to bleed absolutely it depends on what injury they touch themselves it depends on how much blood is accumulated in that injury so you know if you're the person stood on the left and not the right you're the one who goes to jail i suppose the big question is why did people believe that a corpse might deliberately bleed in order to point the finger at their murderer it revolved around this idea that as humans we have three parts to us our body which is corporal our soul which is incorporal and this middling substance that it connects everything and it's a life force and it's this life force that contains the memories and the passion of the person and if a person's life is cut short that life force lingering around the body after death might become enraged in the presence of a murderer and this might cause the corpse to bleed so if a life force or energy was believed to linger after death it wasn't that big a step to think that a murderer could be identified by the body of his victim or that a corpse might need to be physically staked to the ground to prevent it coming back to life and that's not all some of our ancestors believe the vitality in a corpse was so real it could be physically harvested and then used in an extraordinary way when consumed it had healing powers yes i'm about to find out why our ancestors believed in eating the bodies of the undead i'm finding out why our ancestors wanted to protect the living by mutilating corpses i've learned that many people believed a life force remained in the body after death it could enable a corpse to denounce a murderer but this wasn't all some people thought this supernatural energy also had the power to heal the sick if you could get it inside you medical historian dr richard sugg is going to show me some of the stomach recipes our ancestors used to transform dead bodies into medicine [Music] astonishingly cannibal cures were in widespread use from roman times right up until the 18th century and the key ingredient not surprisingly was a corpse full of life force ideally if you had a young man and he died of a violent death and preferably if he hadn't bled out his blood then you had in his body um the prime essence of human vitality there was even a belief that if he'd lived say he was supposed to live to say 80 he died when he was 20 because he died prematurely you could absorb those extra 60 years of vitality from that man's body to us nowadays it just seems like cannibalism doesn't it was cannibalism i think one of the strange things about this subject is it's been almost whitewashed out of the history books because people are a bit embarrassed about it medicinal cannibalism may be a historical embarrassment but in the past people would do anything for a cure from the grave the sick for instance were often to be found at public executions not just to see the blood but to drink it there are numerous accounts of people drinking blood at the scaffolds in scandinavia germany austria and even italy actually as well certainly there's one account at least of someone at a scaffold clutching the dying body with the neck um severed from the head and just drinking it from the neck of the the criminal in germany okay ready so here we go gently does it by the 17th century people thought the distilling blood could make the life force within it even more potent this is it this is it and it is a very different color from what we started with we're getting that kind of gold i mean this allegedly is the color they associated with the spirits of the soul the the blood that the soul in the blood was supposed to be something like this color whoa you can see why people might have thought they were potent you're right though the idea is power you know it smells powerful and maybe it's powerful it's medicine it tastes bad shall i try it i think the smell is kind of nature's way of telling us don't really in fact actually i don't even know why i asked it does smell fairly disgusting i guess if you're desperate enough you might do it but the blood was just the aperitif the life force of a corpse could be extracted from all manner of different body parts luckily today we're using a pig skull rather than a human one this is coming away really nicely actually i thought that i'd be no good at this but i've got loads and loads of shavings already what do you think the logic was behind eating grated skull well although a skull looks very dead and very dry more than anything from a corpse i suppose they still believe you could get vitality out of it at this stage if it died of violent death which was a common instruction um for the type of skull you needed then they believed that this violent death had conditioned the body of the person and the soul had kind of been forced up into the skull and trapped there and it could be trapped for quite a long time and then tapped who would have looked to human body parts for a cure far as we know pretty much everyone we know that charles ii uh mary queen mary and william iii were all given preparations of human skull for example particularly on their death beds it was so closely associated with charles it was called the king's drops everyone knew it as the kings dropped but for some the richest source of this mysterious curative vitality was the soft bloody organ inside the skull this is my favorite now um something called kind of cerebral pate and i think you just said cerebral patter strange but true what we've got here is a pig's brain uh would have been a human brain and what we've got here is some hearts not for the heart itself but for the arteries um and veins and nerves also get mashed up into this pate in our pestle and mortar here the brain is all prepared earlier which is nice and we'd like an artery or two out of there oh yeah i'll see it's sticking out there it's waiting for you it's begging to be taken out yeah there we go a bit of spinal marrow yeah and that's the finishing touch lovely so spoons are ready and let's go i'm not sure i'd be crazy about eating spoonfuls of this the final stage was to take this truly organic mush and distill it into an even more concentrated and potent form so we've taken human brain spinal cord heart lungs this is the creme de la creme of the human body isn't it people actually believed in the soul they believed the soul was very much in the body it was a power it was an entity and this is the the distillation of the [Music] soul the belief in the curative power of the human body was so strong that in the 15th century even the dying pope innocent viii was believed to have drunk the blood of living children in a desperate bid to prolong his life but this vitality or life force ironically wasn't so popular with those about to die they wanted full separation of body and soul the only time they wanted to rise from their grave was on the day of judgment certainly not before so how could you ensure your soul went to heaven while your body remained undisturbed below ground in other words how could you avoid becoming one of the undead well apparently the answer was all down to what you did in those final precious moments [Music] let's say that i'm a medieval man and i'm about to die although actually i'd have been one of the lucky ones because in those days most people would be dead by their mid 30s so i'd be a really old bloke so i've had this long life but nevertheless i'm really worried about dying not because like nowadays you're concerned that it's going to take a long time and it'll be painful and messy but because of the procedures if i don't get them right my soul could be in big trouble okay this is it i'm about to meet my maker goodbye [Music] now that i'm facing my final hours as a medieval man professor peter marshall has agreed to guide me through the correct religious protocols to ensure a good death well i'm going to need you you certainly are okay so i'm now representing the church i'm the village priest um and here we are in your bed chamber yeah and quite a lot of people here probably all gathered around the death bed here to encourage you to make the best possible death what do you mean the best possible death well one that means that your soul is ready uh to um be received by god up in heaven and this is more difficult than it sounds because i thought this may just look like an ordinary bed chamber this is in fact a battleground a spiritual battleground and all around us are invisible forces well invisible to me but probably visible to you so the dying person while everyone else is going oh poor dear we're going gonna miss him i'm hallucinating this apocalypse either you're hallucinating or you in fact can see these realities that are usually hidden from the rest of us it was thought that a medieval person on their deathbed could sometimes see the devil or demons that would stop the spirit leaving the body in peace correct religious protocols known as the last rites could be a way to protect your spirit and ensure you didn't become one of the undead and there really three of these three sacraments or special rituals the first of which is confession confession of sins you've done this before many times in your life but this is the big one this is the final opportunity to get off your chest uh anything that is weighing down your conscience okay right so let's hear it i was a bit grouchy this morning okay that's pretty bad but i think in the circumstances we can we can forgive it uh so i now absolve you yeah as god's representative edgar taylor zolvo in nominee patricid philia is spiritual sanctity okay we've done that lighter already excellent my soul would now be cleansed but for our ancestors the physical flesh needed to be sin free as well we now move to the next stage which involves these special oils with which i am going to consecrate parts of your body this is the ritual known rather alarmingly as extreme unction was it extreme um it's extreme because it's final it just means the last the last anointing of the body function is anointing where do you anoint me well we anoint the various parts of your body representing the opportunities for sin provided by the senses yeah so we start with the eyes nose mouth ears hands um even perhaps the groin area which is um an area i'll leave you to do that one possibly and while we do this we ask god uh to forgive you all the sins that you've caused through misuse of your senses so now we've strengthened the body symbolically strengthened the soul and the final of the last rites the final sacrament is the giving of communion so i have here in this special container the consecrated wafer remember of course that this is physically literally the body of christ so can i die now feel free actually i'm feeling quite well now i don't think i'm gonna time to go [Music] with all the protocols followed my soul or spirit should go to heaven my physical body should now be at rest i'd be happy and those left on earth would know they wouldn't be troubled by my corpse or spirit [Music] but what if these procedures weren't followed what happened to you if you had a bad death well you might be less likely to go to heaven for a start um and a lot of the worry around bad deaths seems to reflect a fear of ghosts returning to haunt the living of spirits that could not be at rest many ghost stories from the middle ages and indeed for centuries afterwards involved murder victims suicides various forms of these bad deaths like hamlet's father absolutely that's a wonderful example of it hamlet of course returns uh to his son describing his murder and emphasizing how he hasn't had an opportunity to make a good death he's been cut off even in the blossoms of his sin unhauseled disappointed unannealed what does that mean that means precisely that he hadn't received the three last rites of the church confession communion and extreme and i now realize that it's the difference between a good death and a bad death that's the key to the whole mystery of corpse mutilation the 19th century stakings where my journey into this macabre practice began were done on people who had committed suicide they'd cut their own life short and died bad deaths this meant their souls and even their corpses were to be feared and the only way for the living to protect themselves was to pin their dead bodies and their restless spirits firmly to the ground something very physical and very final about this act is a real job done moment you can imagine that the person who ran the stake through john williams must have thought he's certainly not going to rise from the dead again now in 1823 the british government finally tried to lay the superstitious practice of corpse mutilation to rest the afterlife was now supposed to be a purely spiritual affair the physical body would no longer play a role after death and the idea of cremation gradually became more and more acceptable [Music] but despite these measures there are still echoes of our superstitious fear of dead bodies even today we tend to associate the corpse with the soul for instance we'll go back to the departed grave in order to talk to their spirit and even when they're nothing but ashes we think very carefully about where we're going to place them because that's where we believe their spirit lingers too ensure uncertain hope of the resurrection to eternal life and remember next time you see a black veil at a funeral it's actually intended to protect the living not honor the dead because a veil can stop the deceased's lingering spirit recognizing you and so hopefully it will leave you alone the lord make his face to shine upon him and be gracious unto him and give him peace amen perhaps unknowingly our fear of the undead lives on next week evil spirits i'll be finding out why our ancestors lived in terror of demons and fairies how could an evil spirit enter your body and control you from within it's really scary and why would a fairy drive you to murder [Music]

Channel: Timeline - World History Documentaries

Views: 176,362

Keywords: History, Full Documentary, Documentaries, Full length Documentaries, Documentary, TV Shows - Topic, Documentary Movies - Topic, 2017 documentary, BBC documentary, Channel 4 documentary, history documentary, documentary history, fear the walking dead, undead, occult, halloween, zombies, corpses, haunted graves, tony robinson

Id: Ri9PNPu-SZM

Length: 47min 12sec (2832 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 06 2020