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  Corpses on the Moors: A Vampire Graveyard in Northern Europe?

Corpses on the Moors A Vampire Graveyard in Northern Europe?

By Matthias Schulz

Part 2: Part Two: Atrocities on the Moor.

But why? It's known that the Germanic tribes offered human sacrifices to their supreme deity, Wotan. They also buried weapons and other spoils of war in the swamps. It is likely that they believed the gods were especially nearby in the lonely and barren moors.

But most of the dead in the peat bogs are apparently victims of the ancient Nordic justice system. The historian Tacitus reports that among the Germanic tribes ordinary criminals were publicly hanged on tree branches. But anyone who had committed "shameful acts," or violations of the moral decency laws, was secretly executed in the moor. This torture, Tacitus continues, was suffered by "cowards in battle" and, more importantly, the "lewd." This is probably a reference to homosexual men, and perhaps those accused of perverse crimes and adulterers. The "Girl of Windeby" ended up in the moor with her head shaved, and her thumb is obscenely placed between her index and middle fingers.

But the disabled also apparently ended up in the clutches of the secret courts. "A noticeably large number of moor corpses had a physical disability," explains Dusseldorf forensics expert Peter Pieper. The 16-year-old "Girl of Yde" suffered from abnormal curvature of the spine. The "Boy of Kayhausen," the moor corpse of a six-year-old boy discovered in 1922 and now on display in the northern German city of Oldenburg -- had last eaten millet and sorrel, and his abdominal wall is torn, the result, researchers believe, of a blow. The hip is crooked, the result of a condition known as ankylotic hip and the boy apparently had a heavy limp.

Sentenced to die by the "moral courts"

He was attacked at some point around 200 A.D. -- stabbed twice in the neck below the left ear, then a third time from the front, just missing the throat. The boy appears to have tried to defend himself, because the blade also penetrated his raised upper arm. Then the murderers elaborately tied up the boy with a noose.

Such signs of brutality are typical. Many moor corpses were essentially killed more than once; the experts call it "overkill." The true scope of these atrocities has only recently come to light. A few weeks ago, Canadian forensic doctor Heather Gill-Robinson examined the "Moor Corpse of Daetgen," concluding that the man (between 40 and 60 years old) was beheaded. He was also stabbed in the chest and his penis was cut off.

Researchers believe that there was an irrational reason for this overkill. The "lewd" had violated taboos and the holy moral decency laws. They were considered impure and shameful, tainted by the stench of what was considered evil sexual passion (because it was forbidden). It was believed they would return to the world of the living to exact revenge.

"The Germanic tribes were afraid of vampires," explains Hassmann. To render them harmless, they were ritually mutilated. Archeologist Michael Gebuehr, who will unveil a moor corpse exhibit titled "Paths into the Afterlife" in the northern German city of Schleswig this week, calls this superstition "fear of demons." According to Gebuehr, the wooden huts of the Germanic tribes were filled with tall tales and horror stories about living corpses, zombies and "Nachzehrern" -- demons that would plunge their teeth into the flesh of innocent sleepers at night.

To prevent all of this, the condemned had to be kept far away from this life. Some moor corpses were impaled. Others were covered with stones or weighed down with fencing material made of branches and twigs. These were all precautions intended to prevent them from leaving the moor as the undead.

Solving the ancient crime

Burning the unholy corpses -- a normal burial custom at the time -- was out of the question. "The evil spirits would have risen into the air with the smoke," Gebuehr explains, "and would then have been everywhere."

Instead, they were chained and banished. The mechanism that was used to kill the "Man from Juehrdenerfeld," discovered in 1934, was especially elaborate. His body was placed into a moor hole and weighed down with a grid of stakes. To prevent him from lifting the grid, the undertakers had pulled the man's two arms from his shoulders.

High-tech tests being performed on the most recent find, the Girl from Uchte, could reveal whether she ended up in the bogs as one of these victims of the court of morals.

It's possible, of course, that the girl simply lost her footing while gathering eggs. But perhaps she was tied up by court thugs, taken into the highland moor, executed and locked away in a vampire grave, a peat-encased tomb from which they believed she could never escape. "Anything is possible," says Hassmann.

In the region near Uchte, on a peat meadow and surrounded by the clamor of crows, archeologist Metzler keeps digging away. He plans to continue searching for body parts until the end of this week. He hopes to find broaches used to tie robes or bits of clothing.

"The police may have been barking up the wrong tree back then," he says, "but the episode remains a criminal case."

Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan