"The First Leper": 25 Times Archaeologists Dug Up Something Straight Out Of A Nightmare

Mount Owen Moa. An expedition was digging deeper into the cave system of Mount Owen in New Zealand when it came across a huge claw. it was determined that the claw belonged to an Upland Moa, a huge prehistoric bird that apparently came with a nasty set of claws

The two most frightening things ever discovered by me, personally, while on a dig are:

1 The human remains on site may have died of cholera. That's one of those “OK, yeah, boss. Do you suppose that maybe you could have mentioned that before I started collecting? And maybe offered us face masks? Or at least told me to buy my own?”

2 The Forest Service put us up in barracks. Once we were all settled in, and started cooking, we found mouse and rat droppings under the kitchen sink. When we reported that to the GS-12, she said “Oh yeah, watch out for symptoms of hantavirus, it has been pretty prevelant around here lately, and there have also been a few cases of bubonic plague in the area.”

Nothing I have found from the past is as terrifying as what I have found in the present!

The Knife-Armed Man

While excavating a 1200- to 1400-year-old necropolis in northern Italy, archaeologists found the remains of a man with a knife blade prosthetic arm. Analysis of the man’s bones revealed that his arm had been removed through blunt-force trauma below the elbow, and that he lived for some time afterward with the knife blade prosthesis in place of a hand.

A calcified mass that would turn out to be a tumor was discovered in the pelvis of the Roman woman's corpse.

The 1000 year old body of Buddist monk was dscovered inside an ancient statue of Buddha. A statue of a sitting Buddha that made its way from a temple in China to a market in the Netherlands revealed an extraordinary secret -- a 1,000-year-old mummified monk.

The mummy was discovered, encased in a cavity in the statue, when a private buyer brought it to an expert for restoration. It's unclear when or how the statue was removed from China.

When archaeologists were excavating a dry prehistoric lake bed in Motala, Sweden in 2009, they stumbled upon one of the most peculiar archaeological discoveries the world had seen – the so-called ‘Tomb of the Sunkenoffering or Sunken Skulls’, a collection of skulls dating back 8,000 years, which had been mounted on stakes.

The Elder Cheese: While the world was still mourning over not being allowed to drink the sarcophagus juice, archaeologists in Saqqara, Egypt uncovered another ancient (and equally inedible) find: the world’s oldest known solid cheese. Protein analysis showed that the 3,300-year-old powdery white substance was likely a mixture of cow and either goat or sheep milk, made into a cheese, which was left in the tomb of an official who served the pharaoh. Scientists warned that the cheese might actually be “cursed” with live bacteria that could sicken anyone who dared to taste it.

In many ancient cultures, elongated heads appeared as a result of cranial deformation, and arguably the most famous examples are those coming from the Paracas culture.

Iron sickles were discovered around the necks of two adult females, buried in Poland! Some researchers believed that the curved knives were placed around the skeletons out of a fear of vampirism. However, a new study suggests that unusual burials are “evidence of anti-demonic funerary practice”. This ritual began to prevent the dead from rising and terrorizing the living.

Additionally, those who passed away abruptly without a smooth transition from life to death, were believed to be at risk of becoming demons

Headless Vikings. Headless vikings were found in Dorset, the archaeologists said maybe some villagers had survived a raid and exacted their revenge. However, it still Brutal way to kill someone

About 2,200 years ago, an aristocratic young Celt was brutally slain and thrown into a bog near what is now Manchester, England. His body, almost perfectly preserved and condition of the body and the manner of the man's death, moreover, suggest that he may have much in common with similar bodies found in peat bogs in Denmark during the 1950's.

The current burst of research and scholarship started at an ancient bog near the Manchester airport, where sphagnum peat moss has been growing for thousands of years. The peat, once commonly used as fuel, is now harvested mainly as a medium for cultivating plants.

On Aug. 1, 1984, a day many archeologists now regard as a milestone, a commercial peat cutter named Andy Mould was about to throw a load of peat into a shredding machine when some of the crumbling moss fell away, revealing a human foot.

Archeologists and other experts subsequently recovered the torso, head and arms of one of the most perfectly preserved ancient bodies ever found. The leathery flesh was stained deep brown and had been distorted by long burial in the wet, iron-rich peat, but facial features, skin texture, physique and even stomach contents were intact.

A flood of discoveries followed, and it soon became evident that ''Lindow Man,'' named for Lindow Moss, the locality where the corpse was found, had been no ordinary Celt. Several pieces of evidence, including the serene expression of the man's face, reconstructed from analysis of muscles and skin, suggested that he had gone willingly to his horrible death. His executioners had cut his throat, crushed his windpipe with a thong, bludgeoned his head and held his face under water.

The First Leper. Leprosy is hard disease which infects humans; leprosy was common in the Medieval period, like king Baldwin of Jerusalem. The first leper man ever was 4000 years before, and this is his skull which was saved through the centuries .

True love was forever for Louise de Quengo, the Lady of Brefeillac. The widow died in 1656 and was interred with a rather alarming trinket: the heart of her husband.

Toussaint Perrien, Knight of Brefeillac, died in 1649. As was sometimes done at the time, his heart was removed, embalmed and put into a lead urn.

"It was common during that time period to be buried with the heart of a husband or wife," Fatima-Zohra Mokrane, a radiologist at Rangueil Hospital at the University Hospital of Toulouse in France, said "It's a very romantic aspect to the burials."

The Greenland Mummies: the dying remnants of the Vikings in Greenland at the outset of the ‘Little Ice Age’

The most frightening thing I have found was the most extreme case of coffin yawn I’d seen anywhere. Coffin yawn is pretty much what you imagine it to be. When a person dies their muscles eventually relax, and this means the jaw will loll open. It is for this reason that, historically, bodies were buried with a cloth binding the chin shut (as with Marley in A Christmas Carol ), or, in the modern day; the jaw wired shut.

Girolamo Segato was an early medical science eccentric. Inspired by the preservation techniques of ancient civilizations, he invented a strange new way of preserving human remains. He injected an unknown mixture of chemicals into a body directly after death to make this eerie transformation.

The Black Sarcophagus

The discovery of a massive, 2000-year-old sealed black granite sarcophagus in Alexandria, Egypt in July 2018 prompted speculation that opening it would unleash a world-ending curse. When opened, the sarcophagus was found to contain only the remains of three Egyptian army officers and a reddish-brown sewage liquid, spawning the #sarcophagusjuice meme.

The Most Unlucky Man

At Pompeii, the site of Mt. Vesuvius’ disastrous eruption that killed the entire town in 79 CE, a man was found who was thought to have been crushed to death by a massive falling stone. Although archaeologists later found that the man’s head and upper torso were intact, they initially hypothesized that the rock had landed on him as he attempted to flee, hindered by an infection in his leg.

The discovery of a mass baby grave under Roman bathhouse in Ashkelon, Israel

Along the shores of Israel's Mediterranean coast, in the ancient seaport of Ashkelon, archaeologist Ross Voss made a gruesome find. While exploring one of the city’s sewers, he discovered a large number of small bones. Initially, the bones were believed to be chicken bones. However, it was later discovered that the bones were actually human –infant bones from the Roman era. With the remains amounting to more than 100 babies, it was the largest discovery of infant remains to date.

A Creepy Tiny Hand. At the Roman fort of Vindolanda near Hadrian’s Wall in England, archaeologists found a creepy, lifelike, miniature bronze hand. The hand may be associated with the worship of Jupiter Dolichenus, a mystery cult whose practices were shrouded in secrecy, which was very popular in the Roman army of the early 3rd century CE. The hand was likely left as an offering after a major invasion of Scotland in which a huge number of people may have been killed.