The Kilteasheen Skeletons

Strange burials in a small settlement in 7th-century Ireland point to a belief in vampires.

An image of one of the skeletons uncovered at Kilteasheen in Roscommon. The rock placed in the mouth was intentional, and occurred after death.

"Kilteasheen Skeleton" by Chris Read credit poweredbyosteons

When Chris Read, a lecturer in Applied Archaeology at Sligo Institute of Technology, teamed up with some colleagues from St Louis University in the USA to develop a site for excavation in the quiet area of Kilteasheen in County Roscommon, he assumed that he would find lots of skeletons. And he did--137, to be exact, although there are probably up to 3000 still buried at the ecclesiastical site that had been identified by the Royal Irish Academy as worth investigating. The archaeologists were trying to find evidence of a hall house--a type of early medieval Gaelic palace--that had been built in the 13th-century. But the skeletons that they unearthed were a bonus, as they provided invaluable insight into life in this remote part of the Irish midlands during the early middle ages.

The site had been used as a graveyard for centuries, from about the 7th- or 8th-century up to the 1500's, and the burials generally followed consistent, predictable patterns. All, that is, except for two skeletons. These two bodies had been treated violently before being placed in the grave--specifically, large rocks had been forced into their mouths, their limbs had been broken, and both corpses had been folded around a large boulder. One of the rocks had been inserted so forcefully into the mouth of the deceased that the jawbone was dislocated. Another strange aspect of the burials was that the two male corpses had been buried outside the perimeter of the graveyard proper, and had not been laid east-to-west in accordance with Christian burial during the medieval period.

The archaeologists at first assumed that these were Black Death burials and that the rocks were safeguards against contagion, but when carbon dating placed the remains as dating back to between 600 and 800 CE, the team had to look for a different explanation. It seems that the people who buried these two men--one aged between 40 and 60, the other between 20 and 30--were not afraid of a disease that they had; instead, they feared that the men would come back from the grave. What Read and his team had found was significant, because it suggests that the Gaelic Irish living in Kilteasheen in the very early middle ages had some superstitions that until recently had been thought of as relatively modern--they believed in vampires.

Ireland does not have much of a vampire tradition in folklore, even if some Irish writers have made significant contributions to the vampire in literature. Irish Gothic writer Sheridan LeFanu penned Carmilla in the 1800's and introduced the world to the tragic, seductive vampire, and of course Dracula author Bram Stoker hailed from Clontarf in Dublin. But both of these men--and the other writers who helped to create the popular, literary vampire we all know today--looked to the superstitions of eastern Europe as a source of inspiration for their tales. Indeed, the very notion that there had ever been a tradition of belief in vampires in any part of Britain or Ireland would have probably amused both LeFanu and Stoker.  

The vampire in popular western culture first appeared as a result of some very strange stories emanating from eastern Europe in the immediate wake of the Renaissance, and their popularity is generally attributed to the spread of ideas and information created by the invention of the printing press. In particular, the Balkan regions of the Hapsburg Empire proved to be a fertile source of lurid, terrifying and seemingly real cases of vampirism. In 1725, Peter Blagojevic died in his home town of Kisilova in modern-day Serbia. After his death, nine further villagers died in mysterious circumstances and locals promptly called on Austrian authorities in the region to investigate the matter. Blagojevic's body was disinterred, and it was noted that decomposition had not occurred and that the corpse's hair and nails had apparently grown. Defying the wishes of the local Austrian official, the villagers wasted no time waiting for permission from the Imperial office in Belgrade, and staked the corpse through the heart. According to eyewitnesses, fresh blood was said to flow from the new wound in Blagojevic's body.

Arnold Paole, a suspected "real" vampire terrorised the village of Medveda in Serbia after his death. The involvement of Austrian officials in the investigation helped to popularise the case in Europe. 

Arnold Paole, unknown author, credit Alchetron

A year after the deaths in Kisilova, another small village in Serbia--Medveda--witnessed its own spate of mysterious deaths. The townspeople of Medveda immediately suspected Arnold Paole, an incomer from the Turkish-controlled part of Serbia. Paole had told people in the vicinity that he had been attacked by a vampire in an area known as Gossowa, but had followed tradition and eaten soil from the vampire's grave in order to cure himself. Within a month of Arnold's death in a farm accident late in 1726, four people who claimed that he had returned from the grave to visit him had rapidly sickened and died. Two army medics--known as Glaser and Fluckinger--were dispatched by Austrian authorities to Medveda, and it is from their reports that the details of the case became widespread. As in Kisilova, the locals disinterred the body and it showed no decomposition and hair and nails were judged to have grown. The body and coffin were also smeared with blood. A stake was driven through Paole's heart--upon which the corpse screamed, according to some reports--and his body was dismembered and burned. Despite these measures, a further 12 people died as a result of suspected vampirism in Medveda five years later, a result--at least according to Fluckinger--of the suspects having eaten the meat of sheep which Paole had previously attacked. 

Today, it is largely accepted that the characteristics of the disinterred corpses in both Kisilova and Medveda were not mysterious at all, but are in fact the observable effects of decomposition under certain circumstances. An example is the apparent growth of hair and nails--a feature noted in both cases. What the villagers and the Austrian officials interpreted as growth was in fact a result of the contraction of the flesh around the head and hands of the bodies, making it look like the hair and nails had grown. All the other signs of vampirism on the bodies of both Blagojevic and Paole are also now understood to be normal parts of the process of decomposition, even including the presence of seemingly fresh blood. 

Other aspects of the tales of Blagojevic and Paole are less easily explained, but probably arise from the intersection between superstition and epidemiology. Sceptics of the vampire stories have been quick to point out that localised outbreaks of the plague were widespread for much of the last millennium, and the deaths of the villagers in both Kisilova and Medveda were most likely caused by such epidemics. As for the sightings of the two men after their deaths, one thing that can be said is that mass hysteria and the search for convenient scapegoats--physically real or otherwise--are hardly unknown phenomena during crises of public health.  

Bram Stoker. The Irish author of Dracula was influenced by earlier literary tales of vampires, but he also carried out intensive research into the folkloric vampire superstitions of the Balkan region while writing his famous novel. 

en:W. & D. Downey[1], William Downey (1829-1915) and Daniel Downey (1831-1881), Bram Stoker1, marked as public domain, more details on Wikimedia Commons

But the effects of such stories on readers in western Europe and further abroad would be felt for a long time afterwards, and arguably continue to the present. Countless vampires in literature and in movies are portrayed as coming from exotic locations in eastern Europe. Transylvania--the home of the Count in Stoker's novel--is the quintessential home of the vampire, and it is significant that a peripheral area on the border between Europe and Asia was chosen as the setting for the book. Vampires in literature have always represented the fear of the other, the exotic and the unknown. It is worth noting that Kisilova was only briefly controlled by the Austrians, between 1718 and 1739, and was otherwise part of the Turkish Ottoman Empire; Arnold Paole had migrated from Turkish Serbia, and had reputedly been infected by a vampire there. 

The discovery of the burials at Kilteasheen suggests that, instead of being a recent import from eastern European cultures, the vampire superstition was once also widespread in the west. Similar "deviant burials" have come to light in recent years in other locations close to Ireland--in Britain, for example, but also in western continental Europe. The beliefs among the Irish in Kilteasheen almost 1500 years ago would perhaps still seem alien to those of us familiar with the vampire superstition today, however; first of all, the word "vampire" would not have existed--the word was borrowed from the Serbian language and is likely Turkish in origin, fittingly--but other features may also have been very different. It is not clear, for instance, whether the people of Kilteasheen believed that the two men they had buried would come back and drink human blood or not, and the rocks in their mouths could have been intended to keep their souls from re-entering their bodies after death. Other elements such as the use of garlic to fend the vampires off and fear of crucifixes are all probably Balkan features of vampire lore mixed with literary embellishment, and would almost certainly be absent.

But the Kilteasheen discovery and the wealth of new evidence of deviant burials in general definitely point to the existence of a belief in revenants--or in Irish neamh mairbh, literally "walking dead"--among early medieval communities. And there was perhaps one important feature of suspected vampires that would be shared between the Kilteasheen locals and their Balkan counterparts of a millennium later--the men were most likely extremely violent, or had died extremely violent deaths. Chris Read believes that they may have been murderers or rapists, or had broken the conventional rules of their society in some significant way. As has been stated earlier, one of the men was older, between 50 and 60 at the time of his death, but the other was a young man aged between 20 and 30. Some analyses of this individual's skeleton have revealed that he was physically large and very strong, and had suffered some damage in battle before the time of his death. 

A satirical cartoon from London's Punch magazine, portraying Nationalists as vampires. Despite the various Irish contributions to vampire literature, folkloric examples of Irish vampires are rare. Discoveries like the one at Kilteasheen, however, suggest that the superstition was common in Ireland a long time ago.

anonymous, The Irish Vampire - Punch (24 October 1885), 199 - BL, CC0 1.0

The dating of the bodies to the 7th- or 8th-centuries is curious; previously, this time period has been regarded as Ireland's "golden age"--between the introduction of Christianity in the 5th-century and the arrival of the Vikings in the 9th--when the country was peaceful and prosperous. The evidence being discovered in archaeological digs in Kilteasheen and other locations suggest that this view of Irish history is naive at best, and that the early medieval period was much darker and more dangerous than has been acknowledged. The two bodies buried in Kilteasheen--twisted around boulders and denied the niceties of Christian burials of the day--can certainly attest to that darker, more hidden past. 

It's worth noting that there is at least one legend of a vampire in Irish mythology, the tale of the Abhartach (literally, "dwarf") from an area near Derry. The story goes that a tyrannical chieftain who practised dark magical arts in life returned from death to feast upon the blood of his subjects. A hero was dispatched to vanquish him, and it took three attempts to do so. On the third death, the hero--legendary warrior Fionn Mac Cumhail in some accounts--staked the Abhartach with a sword made of yew wood and buried him upside-down, then covered his grave with thorns and a large boulder. The upside-down burial should give some pause for thought; it was assumed that the other measures would not hold the Abhartach forever, and he was buried with his head at the bottom so that, when he awoke, he would start to dig facing the wrong way. He would therefore be condemned to dig forever. Considering the broken limbs and boulder-crushed corpses in the Kilteasheen burial ground, it is disturbing to think that this is probably what the locals had in mind for their vampires.